Here’s a friendly tip from someone who knows precious little about orangutans but suspects that, in many ways, they’re not much different from us.

If you want to see the three orangutans who go on view at the Cameron Park Zoo this weekend at their interactive best, you’d best visit the zoo fast. I’m told these orangutans are pretty smart and may soon grow weary of Central Texans.

The other evening, I got to briefly visit Mukah, a 22-year-old Sumatran-Bornean hybrid orangutan male who was raised as a pet, enjoys having his fur braided, likes watching football games and now weighs in at about 240 pounds.

Just for the record, Mukah spent a lot of last Sunday evening sizing up members of the local news media invited to check out the new zoo exhibit. Likely he’ll be doing the same with the general public starting Saturday.

However, 25-year-old zookeeper Lindsey Stein tells me Mukah and the other two orangutans may grow tired of studying us so closely after a couple of months.

Thereafter, I’d advise one way you might attract their attention would be to jump up and down, make weird faces and scratch various parts of your body.

They’ll probably think you’re nuts, but they’ll study you some.

I have to say I was fascinated by the zoo’s trio of orangutans — not just their size but their vitality and seeming interest in everything around them. Lindsey tells me each has his or her own vivid personality. For instance, Mei reportedly enjoys watching the DVD of Disney’s The Jungle Book.

I neglected to ask just who got the bright idea of showing an orangutan a DVD of Disney’s The Jungle Book.

“That’s why I like them,” said Lindsey, who arrived for duty at our zoo last spring, shortly before the orangutans did. “They’re like us in so many ways. They can use a spoon and drink out of a cup.”

If only most of us were truly alike for such simple reasons. But then Lindsey is young and more focused on communing with the great apes.

As I suppose most of our readers know by now, the orangutan project has been a cherished dream of Jim and Nell Hawkins, who not only donated $1 million to make this thoroughly engaging exhibit a reality but helped raise another $800,000 from friends and fellow civic leaders.

Other funding for the $3.3 million exhibit included $500,000 from the Tax Increment Finance Zone and $600,000 left over from a county bond election.

Zoo officials tell me Nell has already gotten to interact with Mukah, and that she didn’t have to jump up and down and make weird faces to keep his attention.

“He loves humans,” Nell said of Mukah. “When I met him, it was his first time out in the yard, just three or four weeks back. We talked, and the first thing he did was swing off the fence, showing off!”

Nell, deeply involved with the Cameron Park Zoological Society, got her love of zoos and particularly the great apes from her days growing up in Fort Worth, when the zoo there was cheap entertainment.

“It always seemed the apes were the most interesting,” she said. “They were so humanlike. I could watch them for hours.”

Those days have stayed with her, resulting in her interest in Cameron Park Zoo and especially the Asian Forest exhibit, which includes a young, somewhat shy female Komodo dragon named Neoma.

Neoma, hatched two years ago at the San Antonio Zoo, was hand-raised, which I’m told isn’t typically how such lizards are raised, especially considering their potentially lethal bite.

When local zoo officials were first introduced to Neoma, she was cradled in a zoo handler’s arms.

Local zoo curator and reptile expert Johnny Binder says that while he’s excited about Neoma and eager to make her feel at home, he’s not about to get quite that chummy as Neoma gets bigger.

Incidentally, Nell tells me the Komodo dragon was named for the mother of longtime businessman Rondy Gray, who contributed significantly to the exhibit.

Some of you can likely guess for whom zoo officials will name the male Komodo dragon once they finally land one: Rondy’s father, Thurber.