Aesop, You Aren't

Since ancient times, people have used animals as allegory to tell stories and share morals.  When it's ancient lore being passed down - think "The Tortoise and the Hare," it comes across as charming, timeless, and insightful.  For some reason when people write crud like this in modern times, I just find it extremely annoying, like a whiny plea for people to recognizing how "deep" the author really is, and then we're all expected to clap at the end of story (I mean, who actually talks like this?).  I wonder if folks thousands of years ago felt that way about Aesop.

Also, don't throw rocks at the animals.  A better ending would be, "And then a zookeeper came up behind them and tipped both of them into the lion exhibit.  By the time the gun team arrived, it was obvious that it was too late to save them, so no actions were taken against the animals.  Thirty witnesses were on hand to say that the wife had pushed the husband in, and he pulled her in after him.  Case closed."

Archetypal Animals

 "I hope that you're the one - if not, you are the prototype."

- OutKast

Visitors go to the zoo to see animals, but with a few specific exceptions, they aren't too particular about what exact animals they see.  For example, you might ask someone what animal they're more keen to see, and they might say "monkeys."  They probably don't care too much about what monkeys they see, whether they're spider monkeys or macaques or guenons.  There are some animals that, while being monkeys, might not be "monkey enough" for the visitor, such as night monkeys or marmosets.  Similarly, they want to see parrots, but for the most part don't care as long as they are "parrot enough" - the key requirements being loud and colorful.

A trend that I've noticed in a lot of zoos is that you get zoo directors and presidents with less direct experience with animals, who are mostly brought in to run the business and drive the gate.  These are the folks who are often making decisions about collection planning and new exhibits, and that includes selecting animals.  They want animals to satisfy the visitors, and look for species that fill the niches that visitors are looking to see.  The thing is, for all of these niches of animal, there's inevitably one or two species which become the most popular by virtual of their visitor appeal (color, strange appearance), ease of care (cold hardiness, simple diet, compatibility with other species), or some other reason.

The result is that many zoos start holding those same few species, resulting in diminished diversity in species across zoos.

Visitors love crocodilians, for example.  Almost every zoo I've ever been to has a crocodile or alligator.  Of all of the world's crocodilians, there's none which probably makes a better exhibit animal than the American alligator.  They grow big, making an impressive animal.  They are tractable and ease to work around.  They are one of the most cold-hardy crocodilians, able to be outside for a great part of the year than tropical species.  Everyone's heard of them; they're cultural icons to a degree few other reptiles are.  Also, they're native to much of the US, and as such work in displays of native wildlife.  It's no surprise that so many zoos favor them.  If a zoo director wanted a crocodilian for display, why pick an small, obscure, delicate, or otherwise more difficult species, like a Philippine crocodile, when you could have an American alligator and the visitors would be just as happy? 

The more zoos work with that one (or handful of) species, the more set their husbandry become, and the more established it becomes in everyone's mind that this is the easier animal to work with, everything else starts to seem more difficult by comparison, and more zoos opt to work with those common species,

The scenario, or similar ones, plays out for penguins (African penguin), lemurs (ring-tailed lemur), waterfowl (mandarin duck, white-faced whistling duck), antelope (bongo, addra gazelle), and a host of other taxa.  The result is zoos that start to look a lot like one another - which maybe visitors don't mind too much.  The end result, however, is that we can support fewer species and have fewer assurance colonies of endangered or threatened species in our care.  

Some zoos, I feel, just need to start being willing to be a little more risk-averse and open to working with species that other zoos aren't working with and to do and be husbandry leaders, not just followers.

From the News: The San Francisco Zoo will receive a pair of pandas from China

The San Francisco Zoo will receive a pair of pandas from China

When China announced that new giant pandas would be coming to the US soon, it set off a flurry of speculation as to which zoos might be the beneficiaries.  San Diego Zoo was an obvious front runner, and I don't think anyone is expecting the National Zoo not to resume its work with the species.  But who else might join the panda program?  

I can honestly say, I was not expecting the answer to be San Francisco.

Despite being such a major US city, San Francisco has, for as long as I can remember, been a zoo that's squarely in the middle of the pack.  It's not famous for its exhibits or its collections in the way that many zoos in less prominent cities (Omaha, Columbus, Fort Worth) are.  There's been more than a little criticism of the zoo's governance in the press lately, and it's perhaps most famous for the fatal tiger attack (the only case of a zoo visitor being killed by an escaped animal at an AZA zoo that I've ever heard of), pushing 20 years ago.  

On the other hand... why not San Francisco?

The city has a long, storied history of association with China and Chinese culture.  The climate is favorable to notoriously heat-averse pandas (Mark Twain famously said that the coldest winter he'd ever experienced was a summer in San Francisco).  And maybe the bears will give the zoo the rejuvenating energy to launch itself to a new era.

It's funny, but I've been to San Francisco twice, and still haven't made it to the zoo, though not for lack of interest.  Perhaps when I swing back next time, I'll make it over there and see giant pandas in my fifth US zoo.

Extinction in Black, White, and Pink

The photo below was taken by David Seth-Smith in 1926.  It's a shame that it's in black-and-white, because I imagine the scene was quite vivid in color.  The birds pictured are pink-headed ducks, a species of waterfowl found in South Asia.  Note the use of the past tense.  Though the IUCN still technically lists the species as Critically Endangered, in truth they have not been seen for decades (since 1949, to be exact), and are almost certainly extinct.

Like the quagga, thylacine, and Carolina parakeet, as well as the famous passenger pigeon, this species survived long enough to be housed in modern zoo collections.  I wonder if the duck had been able to hold on just a little longer, if just a few more birds had made their way into zoos; considering the era, actually, private waterfowl collections, such as the UK's WWT or the US's Sylvan Heights, may have been a better bet.  If enough birds had been kept with serious efforts to breed them, maybe the species could have been saved.  The odds would have been stacked against it, but other endangered species have bounced back from equally dire odds.

Again, the pink-headed duck technically still is an endangered species, not an extinct one, though a formal change in status seems to be only a matter of time.  As another Earth Day passes us by, we can look back at our questionable, rather mixed record in saving endangered species, and try to promise ourselves - and our descendants - that we'll do better to save the next one.  And the one after.

That's OrangUTAN to You!

We're all busy people in the zoo field, and we can't be expected to waste a lot of time of idle chit chat (I type as I listen to many of my coworkers who are, indeed, engaged in idle chitchat at the moment).  We need to keep conversations moving, as as such we need to be brief.  As a community, our lingo is full of acronyms, from AZA to ZAHP, some of which can overlap confusingly with more conventional uses of those same acronyms (a BFF is a black-footed ferret, not your best friend forever, though I suppose they could be the same, while a PDF refers not to a type of file format, but to a poison dart frog).

We also use a lot of short-hand with animals, abbreviating either their Latin names or their common ones.  Many of these have seeped into common usage, which is why many of our guests will speak of chimps, not chimpanzees, rhinos, not rhinoceroses, and hippos, not hippopotamuses (hippopotami).  

But there is one commonly-used short-hand for a popular zoo animal which we should not be using.  Recently, I came across a statement from the Orangutan SSP (itself several years old, but I just saw it for the first time now) explaining why, for reasons of linguistic accuracy and respect for Malay culture, it is not appropriate to call orangutans by the common nickname of "orang."

Orang-u-slang: Why "orang" is no substitute for "orangutan," by Rachel Davis

One commenter on the original post replied with an eye-roll emoji and said "There are more important things to worry about, like deforestation and poaching."  Yes, that's true.  If I had to pick between a world where orangutans were thriving in the wild but called "orangs" and one in which they were extinct, but everyone used the proper term, I know which one I would choose in a heartbeat.  That being said, stopping poaching and habitat loss is going to be an expensive, difficult, years-long struggle... whereas all the SSP is asking you to do is tack on two syllables to the name.  C'mon...

PS: After reading this, I did make a point of going through the blog and changing every use of the word "orang" to "orangutan" - or at least every one that I could find.  If I missed any, please feel free to let me know!

Caring and Community

Even counting for the changes in standards and animal care philosophies over the past few decades, there's no shaking the fact some of the zoos that are now considering some of the best in the country were once pretty awful, even compared to their contemporaries.  Audubon Zoo, Zoo Atlanta, Central Park Zoo, and Oakland Zoo were once nationally famous - or infamous - for how bad their conditions were and how poor their animal care and facilities were.  

Sometimes there was a specific incident which triggered attention and outrage (a comment on the Oakland Zoo review I wrote reminded me of a fatal incident involving an elephant and a keeper at that facility).  Sometimes the general decline and decay finally just became too bad to be overlooked any longer.  In the case of Zoo Atlanta, a specific animal, Willie B the gorilla, became the rallying focus for the need to fix the zoo.

In these cases, there were always calls to shutter the zoo in question.  However, in each case, the community rallied around the zoo and helped rebuild.  I sometimes wonder, if such a list of bad zoos in major US cities were to come out today, how our communities would respond?

There's a tremendous loss of sense of community in many aspects of American life these days, resulting in weaker civic connections.  People don't seem to experience the same pride and attachment in their cities that they used to.  I see some people who share a tremendous amount of pride in their city zoos.  I see plenty of people who seem determined to find fault in every part of their community, the zoo being no exception, with a constant barrage of complaints that their local community can't do anything right.

Zoo Atlanta, Audubon Zoo, and the others are now excellent facilities with admirable standards of animal care and demonstrated commitment to conservation and animal welfare - but this didn't happen in a vacuum.  Turning around a zoo doesn't need complaints.  It needs resources and community support.  One could say that in many cases, a community has the zoo it deserves.

Zoo Review: Oakland Zoo, Part II

Continuing through the main body of the Oakland Zoo, the majority of the exhibit space is given over to the African Savanna exhibits.  

Like California Trail, this area tends to be skewed to the megafauna (but what zoo African area isn't?), though with the inclusion of a few smaller species as well.  Fauna doesn't come much more mega than African elephants, which inhabit one large (six acre) yard.  Since my visit I believe I'd heard that there was going to be something of a shuffling of elephants, with some older animals being sent out to a sanctuary, with the possibility of a breeding herd being established.  I'll have to see what transpires.  Next to the elephants is a very attractive hillside yard for lions, and well as an open paddock for giraffe, and side exhibits for warthog, spotted hyena, and plains zebra.  Part of the region has an African village motif, with one hut housing a small collection of African reptiles, with meerkats scurrying outside another.  A meshed-in enclosure holds a troop of delightful red-tailed monkeys, one of the most handsome of African primates, while two aviaries hold a variety of African birds (including Madagascar sacred ibis, a first for me).

One African exhibit is worthy of a little extra attention because of its curious story.  Separated a little bit from the other displays is a habitat of hamadryas, a desert-dwelling baboon from North Africa and the Middle East, with a spacious grassy yard sprawling out in front of a rocky cliff face.  At the dawn of this millennium, Oakland was on track to try and obtain that most beloved of zoo animals, the giant panda, and this exhibit was built to be the panda exhibit.  Pandas never came, alas, and so the baboons moved in.  Few if any animals match the star power of giant pandas, it is true, but I will say, I think a social group of active, engaged primates makes a better display than a perpetually sleeping (unless its snacking) black and white bear.  So in my mind it all worked out for the best.

As one might expect, the Wayne and Gladys Valley Children's Zoo is largely made up of domestic species, with petting opportunity for kids to interact with goats and sheep.  If domestics aren't your area of interest, however, I'd still recommend swinging through - there are enough "zoo" animals to make it worth your while as well.  A cliffside habitat houses a troop of lemurs, while North American river otters twirl about in front of underwater viewing windows.  There is a surprisingly diverse invertebrate collection in the House of Bugs.  A small collection of reptiles and amphibians can be seen in excellent terrariums in one building, with larger species - American alligators (with a giant mock-fossil croc skeleton nearby) and Aldabra tortoises - seen in outdoor enclosures.  Perhaps the most surprising - and exciting - feature of the children's zoo, however, is the bat exhibit.  A large colony of flying fox bats occupies a towering outdoor flight cage.  Visitors aren't able to walk in with the bats as they are in some indoor rainforest exhibits, but it's still extraordinary to see the large bats out and active in the sun.  (Not part of the children's zoo, but kids will probably want to take a trip to the rides area, located near the gondola station that leads to the California Trail).

The final area is Tropical Rainforest, which I found to be the most uneven of the exhibit areas.  It features fairly standard island habitats for white-handed gibbons and siamangs, a few small aviaries for rainforest birds and small primates, and a fairly ugly, over-engineered chimpanzee exhibit.  There is also a tiger exhibit which, while nice enough, pales compared to the lion and jaguar exhibits elsewhere in the zoo.  The last exhibit I saw in this region, however, was the real showstopper. 

Once a common species in US zoos, sun bears are now increasingly rare, being phased out to make room for the other tropical bear species, which seem to be more sustainable in numbers.  Most of the sun bear exhibits I've seen have been fairly meh.  Oakland's was gorgeous - huge and lushly planted, viewed from  an elevated pavilion that provided a treetop view of the enclosure.  I almost didn't see the bear, the exhibit was so big and dense - it was, in true sun bear fashion, clinging to a tree, mostly obscured by the trunk, and resting completely at ease.  Sun bears are fading out of the US fairly quickly now, with most of the remaining animals being quite old.  I wonder what will happen to this beautiful exhibit when it is emptied - a different tropical bear species, a primate, who knows?

Oakland Zoo is yet another example of a zoo that, in a surprisingly short amount of time, has managed to turn itself around from atrocious to quite good.  Many of its exhibits are of a stellar quality - particularly those of California Trail  - and it doesn't have any that I would really call poor (though certainly some that I would tinker with, given the chance).   I'd also love to see smaller animals get as much attention as the larger ones - the bird and herp collections are fairly small.  Still, it was a beautiful zoo with an interesting collection that was well-cared for in appropriate exhibits.  The commitments to conservation and animal welfare were highlighted throughout the facility.  I was glad to have visited - though I still need to go back to continue my sweep of the Bay Area facilities.