Red Ape Reserve
Walk Through | Animals | Construction Updates

Outdoor exhibit

© Oregon Zoo

Feel like you’re walking through the fragile Southeast Asian habitats wild orangutans and white-cheeked gibbons call home, and take the opportunity to learn about orangutan conservation.
View the orangutans at multiple locations, beginning at a replica of a field researcher's house. Just beyond the house's windows is a covered porch, which is in the animal exhibit, and though the windows resemble everyday house windows, they are made of thick, orangutan-proof laminated glass. In addition to being covered, the porch is heated, providing an all-weather space inviting orangutans close to visitors. Other features include hidden food hoppers, so keepers can chat with guests inside the house while feeding and interacting with the apes.

The mesh-enclosed outdoor portion of the exhibit occupies 5,400 square feet. This space provides the orangutans their first opportunity to experience natural substrates, foliage, water features and weather. Sway poles, vines and trees enable the orangutans and gibbons to swing through their arboreal habitat.

Another highlight of the outdoor space is the signature "enrichment tree." Designed to resemble a massive buttress tree overtaken by a strangler fig, this feature is intended to keep the animals alert, engaged and mentally challenged in their new home. The hollow tree's inside is accessible to keepers via an underground tunnel, and features a multitude of holes through which they can place treats, branches, puzzle-feeders and other enrichment devices. Outside the tree, the primates can wander around, searching for food and stimulation, just as they would in the wild.

New indoor exhibit

© Oregon Zoo

The new indoor space, occupying 820 square feet, is designed to provide more behavioral enrichment opportunities than the orangutans' existing exhibit. The structure of the roof and windows allows them to use 100 percent of the exhibit's vertical space, a massive volume full of trees, logs and vines for climbing. A wall of windows creates a visual connection with the adjacent outdoor portion of the exhibit; making the two spaces seem like one. It also allows ample natural light into the indoor space, aided by large skylights overhead.
Along the visitor viewing gallery, you can glimpse into a new, improved gibbon indoor exhibit. Additionally, a bunker buried under a planter in the outdoor exhibit, with a low ceiling, surrounded by water, provides discreet viewing opportunities into the large outdoor exhibit. The final visitor viewing area, a large outdoor covered space, has covered heated spaces for the apes. Designed to bring you and animals nose-to-nose, this space provides an alternate outdoor refuge to the researcher's house porch.

Conservation education and visitor experiences

The exhibit provides opportunities to learn about work underway to help save wild orangutans and their habitat, as well as what you, in Portland, Oregon, can do to help. Each of the four primary viewing areas touch upon a different theme: At the researcher's house, orangutan rehabilitation centers are highlighted. The reintroduce orphaned orangutans back into the wild. The adaptations of orangutans and gibbons for arboreal life in the forest are topics touched upon at the indoor exhibits' viewing gallery. At the viewing bunker, the serious issue of habitat loss is addressed. Finally, at the covered outdoor viewing area, orangutan intelligence and cognitive research are the topics.
Red Ape Reserve provides you unprecedented opportunities to observe orangutans, indoors and outdoors, exhibiting natural behaviors as they literally climb and swing over your head and come nose-to-nose with you at glass viewing windows.