We celebrate Julius 41st birthday with brask and bram – VG

The jubilee, which saw the light of day on the second day of Christmas 1979, was celebrated with gifts and good food at the Kristiansand Zoo on Saturday.

– When Julius has a birthday, he receives something extra good. So we’ve wrapped up some fruits and some gifts with teddy bears, books, and various surprises, says zoo biologist and animal keeper Helene Axelsen.

The famous chimpanzee had already received sodas and cakes on his birthday, but Axelsen says they have now been replaced by fruits.

– It would not be a crisis if I contracted it once a year, but we try to give them a diet as correct and important as possible. Julius is equally happy with the sweet fruit, he notes.

National celebrity

When Julius saw the light 41 years ago, the animal handler thought it was a girl and gave the little chimp the name Juliane. The name was given with inspiration during the Christmas holidays.

Just a few weeks after the birth, Julius was rejected by his mother Sanne, and they found him bleeding and screaming on the ground. Therefore, the chimpanzee was transferred from the zoo to the house of the adoptive family Glad, and lived alternately here and with the family of the zoo administrator Edvard Moseid for the first year of life. He was also cared for by zoo animal keepers, until he moved back to the zoo.

Already the following year, in 1980, Julius’s story is shown for the first time on television. In the following years, the little chimpanzee becomes a national celebrity.

Julius was made soda and Terje Formoe, who later created Captain Sabertooth, had a huge hit with the song “Here Comes Julius” in 1983. Julius belongs to the West African subspecies of chimpanzee, of which fewer than 65,000 remain. in the wild, according to the zoo.