A House Painter's Obsession Became a Global Conservation Benchmark
The numbers are modest by institutional standards, but the results are not. The Gibbon Conservation Center in Santa Clarita, California, today houses roughly 40 gibbons across five species, some with wild populations of fewer than 2,000 individuals. It is recognized globally as a leading facility dedicated solely to the care and well-being of gibbons — the rarest and most critically endangered primates on Earth.
The center was founded by the late Alan Mootnick, a house painter and remodeling contractor who acquired his first gibbon, named Spanky, in 1976 after responding to a newspaper ad. Self-taught, Mootnick went on to publish papers in scientific journals, host researchers from around the world, and serve as an identification resource for scientists who would send him photographs or play him vocalizations of rescued animals.
'Sometimes they would just send him a picture of a rescued gibbon asking what species, or they will play him a vocalization,' said Director Gabi Skollar.
Mootnick died suddenly in 2011 from heart surgery complications. Skollar, who had moved from Hungary to the United States in 2005 specifically to learn from him, stayed on. She had initially planned to leave and continue her education. She did not.
'We have to keep going and take care of this place,' she said.
Skollar now lives on-site alongside caretaker Jodi Kleier, waking each morning to what she describes as her children singing at sunrise. The gibbons vocalize three to four times a day, for 20 to 30 minutes at a stretch. Their calls — ranging from sounds resembling emergency sirens to low grunts — can carry a mile across the sparsely populated hills north of Los Angeles.
The center's scientific record is concrete. It was the first institution to successfully breed Javan gibbons, an endangered species found only on the Indonesian island of Java. A pair of northern white-cheeked gibbons is soon being sent to the Pittsburgh Zoo. Skollar herself is pursuing a doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying gibbon vocalizations — research she says can directly inform conservationists and sanctuaries working in the field.
Kleier, who started as a volunteer a decade ago, now hand-rears animals abandoned by first-time mothers after difficult births. She and other volunteers wash and cook produce continuously, feeding the gibbons five to six times a day to replicate natural foraging rhythms. She has a tattoo of one of the gibbons, Rocky, on her thigh.
Gibbons face mounting pressure from habitat destruction across the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia and from the illegal wildlife trade, where infants are captured and sold as pets.
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What the Gibbon Conservation Center represents is straightforward: a private citizen with curiosity, discipline and personal capital built something the bureaucratic conservation establishment could not replicate on its own. No federal mandate launched this institution. No agency directive kept it running after its founder died. Individual conviction did — first Mootnick's, then Skollar's.
Free enterprise and civil society, not the administrative state, are what sustain operations like this one. The center's story is a reminder that expertise is earned, not credentialed, and that the most durable institutions are often built by people who simply refused to walk away.
