KEY POINTS:
Take one of the pleasant windy paths at Hamilton Zoo and you reach a bridge traversing the middle of a lush enclosure.
To the left a group of lazy chimps sits high on a wooden platform grooming each other in the muggy heat.
Beyond them is a grassy bank, a little pond, shrubs and trees. There is a sense of rolling savannah and space.
To the right is another expanse of land with more long grass and shrubs and more of that all important sense of space and distance.
Home for these six chimps used to be a small circular enclosure with high claustrophobic concrete walls and nowhere to run.
When they lived at Auckland Zoo in an enclosure never meant for chimps they were known as a particularly aggressive group. Two older females, Suzie and Sally, would be regularly attacked and picked on by the males.
The girls would be cornered and would scream but couldn't get away. It was so bad they had to be separated at night when there were no keepers around to rescue them.
Now, they live in an enclosure 12 times bigger; 3000sq m of relative chimp heaven complete with a big, state of the art, chimp house where they sleep together at night.
Even in the chimp house there is plenty of room to get away from each other if they need to.
The chimps had become so conditioned and stir crazy in their little enclosure, Auckland keepers had doubts whether they could adapt when they made the move south to better digs four years ago.
The results have surprised everyone, especially the director of Hamilton Zoo, Stephen Standley, who was also director of Auckland Zoo for a time and knew the chimps when they were at their worst.
He stands on the wooden bridge in Hamilton on a hot, sticky day heavy with foreboding rain and talks of a chimpanzee success story which is symbolic of an era of enlightenment and of increasing co-operation between zoos.
This spirit of co-operation exists to give the animals a better life and to protect species for the future in an increasingly unstable world of climate change and human encroachment into animal habitats.
Standley, a softly spoken Englishman who once worked with British naturalist Gerald Durrell, explains Hamilton Zoo is 25ha in size but says they're hoping to expand, if they can get zoning permission in this rural area where brick and tile urban Hamilton is sneaking closer.
The master plan is to change the area where giraffe and zebra live to a larger savannah area where female rhinos can be integrated and perhaps bring in lions in a separate enclosure.
Standley loves Hamilton Zoo, which he says has more of a wildlife park feel than Auckland. Auckland is an amazing zoo in the middle of the city but has five times the visitors of Hamilton, about 550,000 a year to Hamilton's 120,000.
Just quietly, Standley likes the less busy zoo he now runs and describes as a well-kept secret.
The chimps are one of the reasons. He gazes at them chilling out and says the animals are so different now.
"We have the space. You can't totally replicate what they would have in the wild, obviously, but I think giving varied space is the critical thing."
Mike was the dominant chimp then and "always boofy," says Standley of the big ape sitting calmly in the sun.
"He was a control freak and you can't be a control freak in the chimp world. He was always trying to dominate the situation."
Once the chimps moved here Mike's youngest son Luka took over dominance in a "relatively bloodless coup" and that is unusual for chimps even in the wild but especially with captive chimps.
On cue, Luka swings down from the wooden tower, screeches and leaps against the wall of the chimp house landing with a big thump. He's just reminding the others who's boss.
On the other side of the bridge a solitary chimp, Lucy, is crouching well away from the others with her arms wrapped around her legs. If you can attribute human emotions to our closest DNA relative, Lucy is looking a bit miserable. It's all good. She had a run in with the others earlier but has the space to get away.
"She can go off and lie down there and they pay no attention to her, or she can wander off to the back of the shrubs, it doesn't matter. That's the difference, it's space and it's interesting space."
Standley confesses he wasn't too keen on these apes when they were at Auckland because they were so wound up and hyper.
Chimps are aggressive anyway, the most aggressive of all the apes, and can do great damage to each other.
The zoo has a hands-off policy with them because even though the keepers know all the different personalities well, they are powerful beings and could easily rip your arm off.
Keeper Catherine Nichols arrives to show us the chimp house. She has no favourites, she says.
They are all great individuals and she has seen very positive changes in them over the past four years.
They're more cohesive as a group. Take Sally, one of the hand-reared sisters. Sally used to spend a lot of time bonding with people through a glass viewing area at the bottom of the enclosure but now does this much less often.
She will even initiate play with the boys now, stamping her foot as if to say "come on, chase me."
It's a huge step, says Nichols. Sally and Suzie were the ones who were so bullied in Auckland.
And we're right about Lucy, the younger female who is looking miserable.
Nichols reads from Lucy's body language that she is feeling dejected because of the earlier fight.
"And that's fine. What she'll do is she'll build up her relationship with them throughout the day. I mean, that's chimps. I don't like being around people all the time, I'm that sort of person and so are they. Sometimes they just need a bit of space."
Standley says when he was director at Auckland Zoo he initiated the chimps' move, not necessarily to Hamilton but to somewhere with more space.
When he moved to Hamilton and Hamilton decided it wanted chimps, he wasn't sure he wanted the Auckland chimps because they didn't get on.
But an Australasian regional programme both the zoos belong to decided Hamilton should take them and now Standley thinks they are happy and is delighted.
You can only judge happiness by comparing their behaviour to what happens in the wild, he says, and in the wild there are times of aggression and times when they are perfectly good-natured.
This mix of behaviours is seen here but aggression is not the dominant factor.
We move on to meet the white rhinos, another example of inter-zoo co-operation.
Two-tonne Kruger was part of a group of rhinos imported from South Africa to Auckland Zoo several years ago and he was recently shifted to Hamilton.
He is part of a regional plan to combat problems encountered when trying to breed captive white rhinos.
"This was a species that was down to 10 at the beginning of the last century," says Standley.
Now, with successful breeding programmes in South Africa the tally is in the tens of thousands. White rhinos are off the endangered list but are still categorised as near-threatened.
Kruger has yet to become a dad but now gets to mate with two females who are quite bossy with him but submissive when it comes down to it.
Part of his move to Hamilton was to ensure the limited bloodlines of captive animals are spread around.
In the giraffe paddock a group of males congregate, the bachelor herd for the region. Auckland Zoo has females for breeding and Hamilton has boys.
Giraffes often hang around in bachelor herds in the wild and here they are in a paddock with zebra and guinea fowl and a nilgai antelope from India.
The animals graze without threat from predators, though they are being eyed up by a cheetah lazing in the long grass in a neighbouring enclosure.
This is intentional. Predators like to see prey, to get a wide open vista, says Standley.
"That's the best thing you can do for predators, it's more important than the space. It's getting that good view because that is what a predator is all about, surveying its surroundings and determining whether there are prey animals and watching them."
Standley is a board member of the Australasian Regional Association for Zoological Parks and Aquariums [ARAZPA]. Auckland Zoo's new director, Australian Jonathan Wilcken, is its former executive director.
ARAZPA links more than 70 zoos in Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific in a co-operative regional network for wildlife conservation.
Wilcken says the tale of the chimps is part of a much bigger level at which zoos co-operate and a fabulous untold story of wild animal conservation.
Networks between zoos are spread throughout the world, he says, but the starting point is the regional association.
These networks are important because when it comes to managing the genetics of captive populations a zoo cannot do this alone.
Bloodlines need to be strong and animals are often transferred between local zoos, like Kruger to Hamilton. A Sumatran tiger called Molek who was in Hamilton has come to Auckland to hopefully breed with Auckland's resident tiger, Oz.
Breeding programmes for endangered animals began as a back-up plan so animals could one day be re-introduced into the wild if they were wiped out, and has become increasingly important over the years, says Wilcken.
This is no doubt not on Kruger's mind as he services the girls from Hamilton but the end result could be that in a 100 years time his descendants, or even the sperm of his descendants, could help re-establish rhinos in Africa if necessary.
"The problems that we face are that wild populations are becoming too small to be sustainable on their own so they start losing their genetic variability and their ability to resist new diseases and to adapt to climate changes and things like that."
There are probably more Sumatran tigers in zoos than left in the wild, he says.
Moving Molek to Auckland was not cooked up by Standley and Wilcken over the telephone but co-ordinated through the regional programme.
A co-ordinator is based in Taronga Zoo in Sydney who also liaises with zoos in Europe and decisions are made with regard to bloodlines and genetics, but the family dynamics and behaviours of a species is always a consideration too, says Wilcken.
With many animals in the wild, there comes a point when they disperse. They may fall out with their mother or the social group and go off to find a new group or hang out as a bachelor bunch for a while.
It would be highly unlikely for a compatible pair of zoo animals to be separated unless this happened naturally in the wild, he says.
Wilcken concedes that zoos are not natural habitats for animals and that some people will always oppose to them but he thinks this can sometimes reflect the principles of the person rather than the animals.
"I find that interesting because I'm not sure that would necessarily be the view of the animals here."
Here they don't have to worry about catching food, get first class health care and live a lot longer than animals in the wild.
The Madagascan ring-tailed lemurs at Auckland Zoo may well agree with their new director. Senior primate keeper Christine Tintinger unlocks double doors to the back of their leafy enclosure where Maarten, originally from Hamilton, lives with seven females.
We sit on the grass and the little primates gather around reaching out surprisingly softly padded hands to gently pull the raisins we offer them closer. They're off as soon as the last raisin is gone. This is a non-breeding group and a good example of the animals' first policy of the zoo.
Maarten, in his late 20s, has done a great job spreading his bloodline around and has now been vasectomised so there will be no more babies in this group while he is alive.
Tintinger explains they could get another male but would have to take Maarten out - yet he is a social primate and this is his group of females. When decisions are made about conservation and breeding what is best for individuals such as Maarten have to be taken into account, she says.
"The best thing is to keep him in the group where he is secure and contented but just stop the breeding."
Tintinger began working at the zoo in 1979 and looked after the chimps. She says Suzie and Sally, descendants of the old tea party chimps, were hand-raised at a time when both zoos and the public thought it socially acceptable to have a chimp in a pushchair wearing nappies.
Those girls were terribly picked-on when the chimps were integrated, she says, and though she loved them dearly she was happy to see them go.
Auckland Zoo has no more space to expand and will never have chimps again, she says. Hamilton has offered them what Auckland could not: "You go down there and you're just blown away by what they've got."
Their leaving has allowed Auckland to concentrate on its breeding programme with orangutans and give descendants of this severely threatened gentle species from Borneo and Sumatra more space, a better quality of life and a chance of survival.
