WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE / Kelley Greene : An Expert Mother : She’s leading the effort to feed and care for two baby chimps at the L.A. Zoo nursery until it’s considered safe to return them to the group.

On a recent morning, Kelley Greene is holding a 7-pound baby chimp in her lap at the Los Angeles Zoo’s nursery, while a small boy in a red T-shirt huddles in his father’s arms outside the nursery windows. The boy looks at the chimp; the chimp looks back. Then the boy turns shyly into his father’s shoulder; the 2-month-old chimp buries his head in Greene’s.

Greene is the main parent to the male chimp and a 3-month-old female chimp have known since they were separated at birth from their mothers because zoo officials feared they might be killed by roughhousing males.

“I feel a tremendous responsibility,” says Greene, 39, the nursery’s lead animal keeper, who holds the chimp’s hand while he feeds. This is the first time that the zoo’s nursery staff is raising baby chimps and then reintroducing them into a group of 13 that will include their mothers.

“It’s scary . . . we did lose that first [baby] chimp,” she says of the 4-month-old killed in May by male chimps’ rough play.

As their primary caregiver, Greene is the one the two baby chimps follow with their eyes and cling to when a kid bangs on the nursery windows. Like human babies, the young chimps need to be held or played with during most of their waking hours. (The similarities don’t end there--humans and chimps have genes that are 98% alike.)

Greene has no children of her own, but she knows something about babies. For 12 years, she has tended baby animals in the zoo’s nursery. She fed a 2-ounce baby tamarin monkey with a 1-cubic-centimeter syringe and a rubber tip-covered needle, and she held a bottle for a 6-foot infant giraffe while standing on a ladder.

“It looks very ‘How hard can this be?’ ” says Dr. Cynthia Stringfield, a zoo veterinarian. “But it requires a lot of intuition and a lot of experience, and just being the right person to be able to get babies started on a bottle and get them comfortable. [Greene] is awesome. She just has a very even-keel, smooth manner with animals.”

She Started at Zoo as Volunteer

Growing up in North Hollywood, Greene gravitated toward animals. She had cats and a horse, and took jobs at a dog kennel and vet’s office. As a community college student, she took a 10-week class at the zoo for animal keepers and then signed up as a volunteer. Two years later, in 1983, she got a job as a keeper.

Greene and three other female animal keepers, along with the overnight zoo staff, will provide 24-hour care for the baby chimps until they are ready to move to the group exhibit. Slowly, keepers are trying to get the babies used to the smells and sounds of their future home.

On this day, at 8:30 a.m., Greene coos to the baby male, hidden under a yellow blanket. (He is unnamed because the zoo is conducting a name-the-baby-chimp contest. The winning entry will be announced in a couple of weeks.)

The little chimp might be seriously crabby. He’s not a morning guy. Still, Greene has a soft spot for the youngster she has raised since he was 3 days old with spiky hair. Now, his hair has settled down into slight disarray.

“Are you buried under your fuzzy, Sweet Pea?” Greene coos, hovering over the crib. “Wanna come out?”

He does. She picks up the 7-pound chimp, changes his diaper and cradles him in a rocking chair. One bottle of infant formula coming up. First, she shakes a drop onto her wrist to make sure it’s warm but not too hot. After his feeding, she burps him.

In August, keepers took the two babies to the adult chimps’ behind-the-scenes habitat while the grown-ups were out of sight in the public exhibit.

In a few months, keepers will let the adults and babies look at each other from a distance and then close up. In 18 months, zoo staff will decide whether it’s safe for the young ones to rejoin the group. Since the first baby chimp was killed, the younger, aggressive males in the group have settled down, zoo officials say.

Even in a nursery, baby chimps will still figure out how to swing and peel a banana, but social cues will have to be learned, Stringfield says. Usually, adult chimps cut babies some slack.

“Chimps know that babies don’t act right,” Stringfield says. Other zoos have reintroduced human-raised chimps into chimp groups without problems, she says.

Mothers May Not Recognize Chimps

Zoo officials say they don’t know whether the two mothers will remember their babies. Both mothers woke up from anesthesia to find the chimps gone, and moped for days afterward but appear to be fine now, they said.

In January, the chimp compound at the zoo made national news after keepers arrived for work one morning and found a surprise--a baby chimp.

They had not suspected any pregnancies, believing that the six males were either too old or too young to reproduce, or had undergone vasectomies; DNA paternity tests are pending. Two other females--the mothers of the babies in the nursery--gave birth in the spring.

In motherly fashion, Greene watches her brood closely. She keeps an extensive log of each baby’s day that includes notes on everything from diaper content to mood swings. She is a blur of motion, chattering nonstop to the chimps while washing bottles, rubbing the male’s gums the way he likes it, looking for the toy key ring that makes the female chimp laugh. Outside the nursery, she also feeds and cares for small animals in nearby exhibits.

But the chimps clearly demand most of her energy. Greene notices the kinds of things a human mother does: The male chimp is outgoing, and the female is shy. He burps like a sailor and she snores. He smiles when Greene blows her lips in a raspberry noise; the baby female likes to swing off the top of her playpen and fall backward.

“They’re wonderful little creatures,” Greene says. “They’re beautiful. They’re smart. They’re hilarious.”

But Greene has no plans for motherhood of her own. “I feel like I get enough of it at work,” she says.

Plus, Greene and her husband have a big family, with 18 animals at home in Sylmar, including two llamas and a guide dog puppy. Even on camping vacations, she brings along her four dogs.

Renee Tawa can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].