Eating healthy over the winter holidays isn’t a problem only for people. Just ask Bakari the gorilla.

One of four gorillas at the St. Louis Zoo, young Bakari gets to his feet when he sees branches from white ash trees fed through a door by his keepers. They’re no different from the discarded brush clippings that fill up yard bins all over town, but for animals it’s a rich source of fiber, vitamins and protein.

One after the other, he fits leafy limbs in his mouth and pulls them out bare, casting them aside like old chicken bones. But he’s not done: Bakari greedily snags branches his inattentive habitat mates were saving for later.

“They are geared to eat lots and lots of leaves,” Heidi Hellmuth, the zoo’s curator of primates, said.

The twice-weekly feedings with the gorillas and other species throughout the zoo in the winter time are courtesy of tons of limbs collected by Ameren Missouri while clearing branches for access to power lines. By late fall, the zoo’s Animal Food & Nutrition Center had stocked its freezer with about 300 27-gallon bins for the winter.

Zoo staff advise the Ameren workers on what species are good for the animals and which to avoid. The current batch on ice features ash, willow, mulberry, hackberry and elm.