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Ituri Forest

How to view Owl Vision: It's easy! Simply hold your mouse button down while scrolling over the image, moving it left, right, up, or down. You're now able to get a panoramic view of the exhibit area! Click on the "+" or "-" buttons at the bottom of the frame to zoom in or out. QuickTime plug-in is required. Click here for free download.

Frolic in the forest

Ituri Forest is one of the San Diego Zoo's most entertaining places to watch inter-species interactions. You can see swamp monkeys play "grab-the-tail" with spotted-necked otters, groom them, and occasionally even hitch a quick ride on the otters' backs as they swim by! For their part, the otters climb low-lying trees and appear to enjoy monkeying around with their simian friends. An otter will roll over and bump a relaxing swamp monkey, for example. Then, when the monkey tries to grab its tail, the otter rolls quickly away, and then back again, as if tantalizing the monkey to catch it. You can often see young guenons and swamp monkeys playing together, swinging around in the trees high above the frolicking otters.

There's inter-species interaction of another kind in Ituri Forest: Zoo visitors and hippos! Our gregarious river hippos seem to delight in both entertaining and observing the humans that come to see them in their luxurious pool. Great eye-to-nostril encounters are possible through the special underwater viewing window. This state-of-the-art pool lets you see hippos in all their glory, from above and below, whether in the water or out!

The real Ituri—an equatorial rain forest in the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo—is full of trees, brush, fallen logs, trip vines, and other dense and thorn-bearing vegetation. The Zoo's Ituri Forest habitat is much easier to navigate, while still giving you a feel for the real thing.

Fun facts

• Two life-size replicas of Mbuti homes, used during hunting expeditions, allow you to enter and learn a bit about the Mbuti people who live in Africa's Ituri region.
• The hippo exhibit originally opened in 1995 and was called Hippo Beach. There is a life-size bronze hippopotamus sculpture for youngsters to pose on and a replica of a hippo skull to view.
• The fish you see in the hippo pool are tilapia. They help keep the water clean by eating the hippos' dung and scraping away algae. They will even give the hippos a "massage" by scraping away old skin and growths.
• An okapi sign has a life-size photo of an okapi sticking out its long, blue-black tongue. Kids have fun trying to stick out their tongues too—have your camera ready!
• Buildings in Ituri Forest were designed to complement the overall look and feeling of the original African habitat.