When Chloe the gibbon and her mate Ivan hear trucks rumbling along nearby streets and helicopters clacking overhead, they dart and leap erratically. Betty, Truman, Sasha and Tuk soon join the frenzy, along with 28 other apes.
But the residents at the Gibbon Conservation Center aren't just monkeying around.
"It's a stressful situation for them," said Alan Mootnick, founder of the nonprofit center just outside Santa Clarita. "They don't know which direction to turn. It's like they're trying to get away."
It's also distressing to Mootnick, a soft-spoken self-taught expert on gibbons who has won praise from zoologists and has published dozens of scholarly papers in peer-reviewed publications, including the International Journal of Primatology.
Professional primatologists say the center is home to the largest and rarest group of gibbons in the Western Hemisphere. The collection includes Hylobates gibbons, the only nonhuman primates to naturally walk on two limbs, which often have a white ring of fur around their faces; tailless Symphalangus, which have two fingers on each hand fused together; hoolock gibbons, distinguished by their bushy white eyebrows; and Nomascus, which have fluffy, light-colored cheeks that resemble sideburns.
But now, encroaching urban development is threatening the health and well-being of the gibbons from Southeast Asia, Mootnick said. He is trying to raise funds to move the zoo-like facility that he founded in 1976 in then-sparsely populated Bouquet Canyon.
Less than 500 feet from the center's front gate, work has begun on the first phase of a $1.8-billion Southern California Edison project to tap wind power and eventually deliver 4,500 megawatts of renewable power to California's grid.
Don Johnson, the project manager, said he was unaware of the proximity of the Edison effort to the gibbon center, but the company had sent notices to area residents warning of possible noise and disruption, and so far there had been "no inquiries or complaints."
In addition, Bouquet Canyon Land Fund Eight has applied to Los Angeles County to build 334 single-family homes on about 500 acres neighboring the center.
Mootnick fears the worst if this project is allowed to proceed.
"It will stress them out, the sounds of the bulldozers and machines," Mootnick said.
