from the editor
PHOTOS Behind the Lens …
iApe Here’s one way to measure the success of the ape iPad training program at Rolling Hills Zoo: This column is guest-authored by Rusa the orangutan on her touchpad tablet. Well, not really. For now, Rusa and her mate Clyde prefer spending their screen time on apps with bright colors and sounds: Thumb Piano, Fish Farm and Paint Sparkles. (Then again, so do many humans.) Christine Ashcraft, the zoo’s primate keeper with Rusa in the photograph above, says it is difficult to measure exactly what her orangutans are learning in their iPad sessions. Who knows where it could lead? If chimpanzees can talk in sign language, why couldn’t an orangutan learn to update her Facebook status? Ashcraft says what she definitely observes is this: Rusa and Clyde are intrigued by their interactions with the electronic screen. And that process of fascination and discovery is one of Ashcraft’s primary goals as a keeper dedicated to ensuring the well-being and stimulation of the animals in her care. I think the orangutans’ experiments hold a lesson for on the us as well. After all, if a middle-aged ape can start up cover: a Fish Farm, then what are we capable of doing in our Clyde, a own lives—online or in the wild? Sooner or later, there 37-year-old orangutan, will be an ape who can Google that answer for us. looks out from his enclosure at Rolling Hills Zoo. Photograph Bill Stephens
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Sunflower living summer 2013
nathan pettengill editor
Photographing animals at Rolling Hills Zoo was a homecoming of sorts for Bill Stephens. The Topekabased photographer first visited Rolling Hills for an assignment with the state tourism department shortly after the facility opened to the public in 1999. “I had heard about the zoo and was pleased to see that everything was in the open-air and the animals were outside in natural habitats,” recalls Stephens. More than 10 years after his first visit, Stephens says what struck him most was how much the landscape at the zoo has developed. “The museum building wasn’t built yet, the road leading into the park was gravel, the landscaping was only one-tenth of what it is now,” says Stephens. But working with animals was much the same as it was a decade ago. “With the chimpanzees, I approached them like I would children—you want to get down to their level, first so you don’t intimidate them and also so that you can use a short lens to allow you to get nice and close. That makes a big difference in getting an intimate, close portrait.” Being near the animals, says Stephens, allowed him to study the relationship between them and their keepers. With the chimps, for example, “you could see how the keeper looked directly into their eyes and how they looked directly at her, how they talked and connected with one another. You could tell the keeper thought of these animals as creatures, not things that were on display … and that was what I wanted to show.”