Zoo Story (21 page)

For all the beauty of this place, the researchers were struck by how empty it felt. Dustin, normally joking and talking nonstop, stood at the edge of the stream, wrapped in solitude.

Almost all of the frogs were gone. Erased, seemingly overnight. Nothing would bring them back.

A moment of silence,
then an observation.

It had only been a couple of weeks since Lowry Park sent Jeff and Melinda to Manhattan with Arnold and the other animals. Now the same institution had helped send Dustin to the wilds of Central America on behalf of a critically endangered species. In the arc between these two trips, Lowry Park revealed the spectrum of its ambitions—and the difficulty of knowing exactly what to make of those ambitions. The appearance on the Conan O’Brien show might have seemed nothing more than a publicity stunt. But Jeff and Melinda saw it as an unprecedented opportunity for Lowry Park to help millions of Americans connect with wildlife. Jeff pointed to the moment when Ivan the eagle owl took off and spread his wings in front of the camera. Ivan’s impromptu flight, Jeff noted, was probably the first time many watching at home had ever seen an eagle owl flying or had even heard of such a bird.

“To see an owl fly around like an owl should fly—that’s huge,” Jeff said afterward. “There is entertainment value there. There has to be.”

The Panama trip was not so easily judged either. What appeared to have been an altruistic act by the zoo was not that simple. Lowry Park did support the trip, but not nearly as much as it might have. The zoo’s conservation fund donated about $750—enough to cover Dustin’s plane ticket and expenses. But his request to use work days had been denied. Dustin had to devote almost three weeks of his vacation time, nearly his entire allotment for the year, to join the research team in Panama. In the end, it had been Dustin’s dedication to the golden frogs, not the zoo’s, that made his trip possible. Did that mean Lowry Park didn’t care? Hardly. Dustin himself acknowledged the zoo’s ongoing support of endangered amphibians. That was why the herps staff worked with the poison-dart frogs; it was why the zoo was bringing in some of the golden frogs. In recent years, Lowry Park’s conservation fund had donated more than $3,000 toward efforts to save the golden frogs.

Lex would have said that an appearance on national TV—and any resulting bump in profits—was precisely what made it possible for the nonprofit to fight for the survival of the frogs and other endangered species. The reverse could be argued as well. Critics often said that such conservation efforts were token gestures, designed to legitimize the larger exploitation that zoos perpetrate every day on countless other species in the name of entertaining the masses.

Considered together, the two trips were just another reminder of how at Lowry Park, as at any zoo, the motivation behind every act was open to question. Every decision invited suspicion. Every claim required inspection.

The phone lines
kept repeating the mantra: “Thank you for calling Lowry Park Zoo, voted the number-one zoo in America for families.”

Lex’s vision was materializing. The zoo was winning accolades, drawing bigger crowds, growing almost by the day. A year after the grand opening, Safari Africa was already completing phase two of the expansion, with new exhibits featuring white rhinos and meerkats. A skyride was installed, offering aerial tours. Soon, Ellie would deliver the first calf of what Lex hoped would be many born into the new herd. He frequently checked on Ellie, whose due date was still months away. He and Brian French were disagreeing these days about how to handle Ellie’s delivery and what to do with the calf. Brian believed it would be essential to relax the rules of protected contact and allow him into Ellie’s enclosure to help her with the delivery and to decrease the chances that she would kill her newborn calf. Lex agreed, but it was clear that their differing views on elephant care were not about to go away. Brian was already lobbying to train the baby elephant with free contact, to encourage the bond between the calf and its keepers. Lex preferred to focus on the bond between the calf and the other elephants. As much as possible, he wanted Lowry Park’s herd to live like the herds in Africa. He kept touting his game park plan, describing it as the real future of Lowry Park. The man always had his eye on the next big thing. He breathed ambition.

The never-ending drive to the top was wearing thin among some of the staff. A few keepers still had mixed feelings about the decision to bring over the wild elephants. They’d seen for themselves that the four Swazi elephants appeared to be doing well, and they respected the way Brian French and his staff had worked to help the herd adjust. Even so, Lex’s big push had left some wondering, more than ever, about the zoo’s priorities and direction. One of the doubters was Carie Peterson. For years, she had been relatively happy working at Lowry Park despite the low pay. By early 2005, though, a growing number of things troubled her. Lowry Park was a nonprofit, but to her it felt as though the place was increasingly being run like a business. She worried that the staff was already overworked and was asked to do too much with too little. Carie didn’t understand how Lowry Park could afford the elephants and the other new animals, when as far as she could tell, the budget was already stretched to the limit. If the zoo could find millions of dollars to build a state-of-the-art elephant building, why couldn’t it spare a couple thousand to splash some new paint on the walls or fix the damaged doors in the night houses of her department?

Carie tried to be patient. She had voiced her concerns and hoped the problems would soon be addressed. She couldn’t imagine walking away from the animals, especially Enshalla. When the tiger finally got pregnant and delivered her first litter, Carie wanted to be there. For Enshalla, she would stay a little longer.

In the elephant building,
Lamaze class was under way. Brian French and the rest of his staff had begun to prepare Ellie for labor and delivery. They were teaching her to lower her body by spreading her back legs and bracing them, so that when the baby arrived, it would have a shorter drop to the hard floor. If Ellie stayed in the wide stance, there was also less chance she’d step on the calf when it emerged. With the permission of his supervisors, Brian had begun briefly tethering Ellie’s legs—sometimes one, sometimes two—with nylon straps to the bars of her stall. Brian and Steve tethered her before they went into her stall. They wanted Ellie to grow accustomed to the tethers, so that if necessary the staff could restrict her movement during the delivery, offering some safety to both the calf and the humans who would approach to help.

That fall, as Ellie’s pregnancy entered its final months, Brian and Steve worked with her every day, practicing the bracing position, teaching her to shift her front legs so the baby could nurse. Brian had wired the night-vision cameras in the barn so that he and the other keepers could call up the video feeds on their computers at home. As the delivery date drew closer, the staff took turns checking the feeds. If Ellie went into labor at night, they wanted to get back to the zoo as soon as possible.

One night in mid-October, it was Brian’s turn to take the three-a.m. check. He signed on to his computer at home, scanned the feeds from the night-vision cameras at the zoo, saw that Ellie was doing fine, then went back to sleep. An hour or so later, he was awakened by another keeper calling to tell him that the camera feeds weren’t coming up on his computer. Apparently the server had crashed. Brian wasn’t worried; Ellie was still a month away from her due date. Besides, he and Steve were scheduled to be back at the zoo before dawn.

At 5:45 a.m., when Brian arrived, he heard an unusual sound from inside the elephant building. A bucket being kicked, maybe. Had someone left it in one of the stalls? He walked into the building and through the kitchen toward the double doors that led into the darkened barn. When he pushed open the doors, a newborn calf ran forward, straight into Brian’s leg. It was a male, still bloody, weighing maybe two hundred pounds. Brian’s brain raced to catch up. Ellie was still in the barn. Somehow she had given birth on her own. It had to have happened in the past hour, just after the server went down.

The calf was excited and wanted to move. Brian wrapped his arms around him and held him steady. The floor of the kitchen was slick, and if the calf fell or crashed into something, he could hurt himself. Brian looked him over and made sure he wasn’t already injured. He stuck his hand into the calf’s mouth to see if his airway was clear and pulled out some placenta. He wanted to check on Ellie, but he had to wait until someone else arrived to watch over the calf. Another keeper, someone who worked with the zebras and giraffes, walked in at that moment and found Brian and the calf, locked in their slippery union.

“Oh,” the other keeper said. “An elephant.”

“Yeah,” said Brian. “C’mere and hold him a minute.”

He ran out to his car, grabbed his cell phone, called Steve. “We have a little bit of a surprise.”

The calf was
blue and wet and wobbly on his feet. His head was still cone-shaped from being squeezed through his mother’s birth canal. His eyes were wide, the black pupils lined with red. His ears appeared pink from the blood vessels under the skin. The umbilical cord had already been severed, but what remained—a short tube—dangled from his belly.

How had his mother delivered the calf on her own? Had she remembered the Lamaze exercises the humans taught her? How had she reacted when she first saw the calf? Brian and Steve and the other keepers had no idea. The only witnesses had been the other elephants, who watched the calf take his first steps before dawn. Lex, who soon arrived to check on the new addition, called it “the virgin birth.”

Once the calf was born, he had been small enough to wander between the bars of the stalls. Lex and Brian knew they were fortunate that those first minutes had not careened into disaster. Ellie might have stepped on her baby, or the calf could have roamed into a stall with one of the other elephants and been stomped or kicked and possibly killed. Instead he had found his way into the arms of his human keepers.

The staff moved quickly. Dr. Murphy was summoned. Ellie, in her stall, appeared to have recovered from the delivery, but was obviously unnerved. When Brian and Steve brought the calf back into the barn, Ellie kept her distance. Her ears were pushed out, and she would not look at the baby. She had no idea what to make of him and wanted nothing to do with him. Overcoming her rejection, and soon, was crucial. Already the calf was trumpeting with hunger. If the keepers couldn’t get Ellie to let her baby close enough to nurse, the chances were they’d never bond. Brian and Steve moved Ellie to a clean stall and tethered her. They wrapped a harness around the calf’s torso and attached it to another strap, so they could pull him back to safety if Ellie became aggressive. Then they slowly led the newborn closer to his mother.

“It’s OK,” Brian told Ellie. “It’s all right.”

She was not convinced. Her eyes were wide. When the calf drew near, she tried to shoo him away with her trunk.

“OK, Ellie, hold still,” said Brian. “Steady. It’s not going to hurt you.”

With the human’s encouragement, the elephant began to calm down and stopped trying to push the calf away. She reached out with her trunk, touched him briefly, then pulled the trunk away. Brian stood next to her and let her feel his hand on her skin again.

“Brace,” he told Ellie, and she obeyed, moving a front leg forward so the calf could nurse. Before the keepers let him get that close, Brian reached under Ellie and massaged one of her nipples to get the first few drops of milk. Soon the calf was underneath her. He was too short to reach his mother, so the keepers gave him a little platform, only a few inches high, to stand on. After several tries, he latched on, and Ellie visibly relaxed. Her milk was flowing. So were her maternal instincts.

“Good girl,” Brian told her.

Already, Ellie had shown more fortitude than anyone could have asked. Now she gave a hint of what kind of mother she would be. As her newborn finished his first meal and fell asleep, Ellie reached with her trunk toward the hay scattered around the floor and covered the calf with a makeshift blanket. Then she stood over him, watching and waiting until he needed her again. For the moment, the controversy surrounding Lowry Park’s herd had become moot. All the arguments about keeping elephants in captivity temporarily fell away. The baby was here, and would not survive without his mother and human caretakers.

New life insists. It does not debate. It simply appears, trembling and hungry, and will not be denied.

In those first days after the virgin birth, Lowry Park held its breath. The calf’s vital signs looked good, and Ellie allowed him to nurse. But there was no point in tempting fate, so the staff kept him secluded inside the relative quiet of the elephant building.

“We are cautiously optimistic about his survival,” said Dr. Murphy.

As the newborn elephant gained weight and grew stronger, Lowry Park prepared to celebrate in earnest. The calf’s arrival was another triumph for the zoo, potentially its biggest yet, and the marketing team knew how to capitalize on the moment and maximize exposure. Several weeks after the birth, when the zoo announced the baby’s debut, crowds pressed forward. Every time the calf tottered on his stubby legs or raised his tiny trunk or weaved under Ellie’s legs to nurse, the gallery erupted with oohs and aahs. Already he had learned to blow bubbles with his trunk, to find shade under his mother’s belly, to bond with Matjeka and Mbali, his new aunts, when Ellie stepped away to eat. Behind the scenes, the keepers had already bestowed him with a house name.

“He looks like an Eli,” Steve Lefave had pronounced, sizing up the youngster, and Brian French agreed, and so an Eli he had become. But the calf still needed a public name—another marketing opportunity—and so the zoo announced a contest, inviting schoolchildren to suggest African names with special meanings. Once the nominations were in, the zoo picked five finalists and allowed the public to vote online. The five nominees chosen by the zoo—Jabali, Jasiri, Kidogo, Moja, and Tamani—were all designed to conjure the wide-open spaces of the savanna, even though the calf was not likely to ever set foot in Africa. They were stage names, selected to perpetuate a larger illusion of wildness.

More than ten thousand votes were cast, some from as far away as France and Argentina, and the clear winner, suggested by a second-grade class at Frontier Elementary in Clearwater, was Tamani:

Tamani means hope in Swahili. We chose hope because elephants are an endangered species and successfully breeding elephants in captivity gives the species hope for survival.

The front office was ecstatic. Lex’s plan to build a new and more popular zoo around the elephants was exceeding expectations. Lowry Park had weathered the controversy over the importation from Swaziland and had successfully started a new breeding herd. Ellie, now reigning as the unquestioned matriarch, was turning out to be the devoted mother of the first of what the zoo hoped would be several calves born on the grounds. The other four elephants were already growing old enough to begin breeding as well. As the zoo headed into 2006, attendance topped more than a million visitors a year, hitting a mark that Lex and so many others had worked toward for so long. The animal collection was exploding. The zoo was adding pygmy hippos, dwarf forest buffalo, and scimitar-horned oryxes, all to stock the next phase of Safari Africa. Over in primates, Rango and Josie had delivered another baby orangutan. The Panamanian golden frogs, breeding in a back room of the herps department, had produced more than two hundred tadpoles.

And yet, beneath the waves of exultation, there were unmistakable signs of an undertow. A sense of something approaching its limits. It was there in the exhaustion in the eyes of the keepers, in the way their faces went blank when they heard Lex giving another pep talk about the next round of new exhibits and how they all needed to work a little harder. For those watching closely, the signs declared themselves, too, in the fine print of who was included and who was shut out in the swirl of excitement over Tamani’s birth.

Every institution has its hidden workings, quiet shifts in the power structure that are revealed in the smallest ways. When the Soviet Union was still in power, CIA analysts devoted considerable energy to poring over photos showing which commissars were allowed to stand at the dais on May Day, when columns of the empire’s weaponry and armies rolled through Red Square. Lowry Park, a nonprofit just named the best children’s zoo in the country, was hardly an evil empire, even in PETA’s most virulent condemnations. Still, if a team of Kremlinologists had turned their attentions to the hierarchy at the zoo, they might have noted that the only two people who spoke at the press conference announcing the elephant’s calf birth were Lex and Dr. Murphy. Brian French, who had shepherded the new herd into existence and coached Ellie through her pregnancy, was nowhere to be seen.

Brian, always camera shy, did not take offense at being excluded from the limelight that day. But he was caught off guard, only a month or so later, when Lee Ann Rottman called him to her office and told him that the zoo was letting him go.

“When?” Brian remembers asking.

“Now.”

Brian called Steve Lefave, who was out checking on the rhinos, and told him he needed to come take care of the elephants. Then he gathered his things and drove away, stunned.

Afterward, Lowry Park’s spokeswoman declined to comment on the dismissal. “It’s a personnel matter that has nothing to do with the animals,” she said.

The unofficial word around the zoo was that the firing had grown out of a conflict between Brian and Lex—a conflict that had everything to do with the animals. In interviews, both Brian and Lex confirmed that they’d had a difference of opinion about the protocol for the handling of the elephants. Brian had enjoyed working in the same enclosure with baby Tamani and was eager to continue with free contact. He wanted to move slowly before introducing the calf to the two males. Lex insisted that the keepers stick with protected contact but wanted to see Tamani roaming the yards with the cows and the bulls. “He wanted to put all the elephants together to create a herd environment,” Brian said afterward. “He wants to run things a lot more like a game park than a zoo.” Asked for his version of the split, Lex essentially agreed with Brian’s. He preferred the zoo’s herd to be together, as they would be in the wild. Brian, he said, wanted to return to working free contact, as he did with the circus elephants.

In retrospect, the collision seemed inevitable. Both Lex and Brian had strong temperaments and different notions of how best to work with the elephants. Once they clashed, there was no doubt who would prevail.

Brian’s departure might not have been so significant if it had been an isolated incident. But a startling number of staffers were leaving Lowry Park, including three of the six assistant curators. Some exited on good terms, in search of a new challenge; Dustin Smith, the herps expert who went to Panama to study the golden frogs, took a job with Busch Gardens. Kevin McKay had accepted a position at Animal Kingdom. Andrea Schuch had gone back to school to pursue a master’s degree. But other keepers disappeared amid a cloud of whispers. By that spring, the staff roiled with nearly constant turnover.

“Everybody knew that you could get fired at any time, for any reason,” one former keeper said.

It was hard to tell what to make of the pattern. Were the departures just the growing pains of an institution redefining itself? Or were they evidence of a deeper problem?

In the Asia department, Carie Peterson debated whether she should join the exodus. During her shift, she stayed focused on Enshalla and Eric. The two Sumatran tigers were together now whenever Enshalla cycled into estrus. But still she showed no sign of pregnancy. Dr. Murphy was preparing to run some tests to find out what was wrong. Carie understood that it might simply be too late for Enshalla to have cubs. Even so, it was almost impossible to think of her as old or past her prime. Ferocious as ever, she still intimidated keepers with her snarling leaps against the mesh. She remained the embodiment of William Blake’s tyger, her eyes burning in the shadows of her den, radiating a glorious menace.

“She’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful,” said Carie, sighing as she watched her. “And she knows it.”

Her attachment to Enshalla was the only thing keeping Carie from quitting. She had lost almost all her faith in the zoo. Only a small part of her even considered the possibility that things would get better. Lex had plotted a certain course for the zoo’s future. She did not see him changing his mind.

The old man
with the thick white hair and the weathered face stood at the edge of the chimp exhibit and grinned. Herman, stationed at his perch, saw him and rocked his body and raised his arm in greeting.

“That’s my son,” said Ed Schultz, turning to any of the visitors milling around him who would listen.

Thirty-five years had passed since Ed and his family had brought Herman to Lowry Park, pausing to let him climb the light pole on the way inside. Ed, ninety-one now, was hanging on the best he could. His wife, Elizabeth, had died years before. Their kids, Roger and Sandy, were grown and lived elsewhere with children of their own. Ed was in and out of the hospital these days. His hearing wasn’t so good. His mind lost track of things. But he had never forgotten Herman, and clearly Herman had never forgotten him.

Ed had long since retired, but he still lived in Tampa, and for years he had volunteered as a docent at Lowry Park, giving tours and helping out however he could. Ed’s favorite pastime was going to see Herman and telling stories about their life together. At his home, photos of Herman hung next to portraits of Roger and Sandy and the grandchildren. Ed had folders overflowing with pictures of Herman and would sift through them and hold them with trembling hands as he talked about the day young Herman joined them at the company picnic or the time when Herman went fishing with the children. For Ed, Herman was the bridge between the past and present. At the zoo, whenever Ed looked across the moat at his old friend, the years fell away, and suddenly he was back in Liberia, holding Herman for the first time. That day so long ago, when Ed had scooped the baby chimp out of the orange crate and into his arms, there had been no way for him to foresee all the implications of this action. What it would mean for both of them, all the ways it would shape them. How their lives would braid together across the decades.

It was difficult to know exactly what Herman made of the relationship. The chimp still felt a deep connection to Ed; that much was obvious. Still, the keepers had noticed an edge of desperation to Herman’s displays, especially as Ed’s visits ended. Sometimes the keepers wished he wouldn’t stop by so often. Because every time Ed walked away, it seemed to leave the chimp shaken.

Thirty-five years had passed since the Schultzes had brought Herman to Lowry Park. He must have known that his human family loved him, and yet that knowledge must have made his abandonment all the more bewildering. Was it possible that Herman had spent the rest of his life trying to figure it out? Maybe a small part of him still wondered, whenever Ed showed up, if this time he would finally get to go home.

Early in that summer of 2006
, the primate keepers were beyond excited. For the first time in years, their chimp group was about to get a new baby.

The young female’s name was Sasha. She had been born at the Montgomery Zoo, but her birth mother had rejected her. Lee Ann had arranged for Sasha to be brought to Lowry Park. Knowing Rukiya’s strengths as a surrogate mother, Lee Ann and the other keepers were preparing to slowly introduce Sasha to Rukiya and the rest of the group, hoping the matriarch would adopt her, just as she had adopted Alex years before.

Lee Ann, who loved baby chimps more than anything in the world, beamed whenever she got to hold Sasha. In those first weeks, while they prepared to introduce her to the group, Lee Ann and the other keepers allowed Sasha to explore their offices in her diaper. At night they took her home and bottle-fed her formula. She was light and soft and full of energy. She already loved the staff, especially the men. When she saw a human male, even one she’d never met, she would immediately raise her arms for him to pick her up, just as Herman had automatically raised his arms to Ed so many years before.

By early June, the introductions were progressing. Sasha had not yet met Herman or Bamboo. The protocol called for the process to unfold slowly and carefully. So far, the baby had been introduced to both Rukiya and Twiggy. The keepers placed her in a small cage—a “howdy cage,” Lee Ann called it—beside the area of the night house that belonged to the females. This gave both the baby and the adults a chance to see and smell one another. It was their way of becoming acquainted, and if it went well, the next step would be to place Sasha in the same enclosure with Rukiya. There was no telling how young Alex would react once he met Sasha and realized he was no longer the baby of the group. It was also impossible to know how Herman and Bamboo would respond. Lee Ann believed Herman would accept Sasha, just as he had accepted Alex, and that his acceptance would guide the others. For the moment, Sasha had been kept away from the males; they might have smelled her scent lingering in the howdy cage, but they had not yet seen her.

As far as Lee Ann could tell, Sasha’s arrival had not yet caused any ripples among the other chimps. Except for Alex’s obvious ambitions, the group appeared to be as stable as usual. Herman and Bamboo had tangled briefly not long ago. The fight seemed a little more intense than some of their previous squabbles. But afterward they seemed to make up, like always.

Walking past the exhibit a few days later, Lee Ann noticed something odd. Rukiya was sitting behind Bamboo, grooming the hair on his back—a favor Lee Ann had never before seen Rukiya perform for the lowly male. Still, after the bullying the females inflicted on Bamboo, it was refreshing to see him and Rukiya getting along.

That’s nice, Lee Ann told herself.

The emergency call
went over the keepers’ walkie-talkies just after noon on Thursday, June 8. The call was so feverish, the voice on the other end so urgent and strangled with emotion, that it was difficult to make out exactly what was being said, other than the word “primates.” The chimps were fighting. They would not stop. The keepers needed help.

Lee Ann happened to be working in the primate area that day. She and the other keepers did not witness the start of the fight, but when they heard the commotion from the exhibit, they rushed out and saw Bamboo and Rukiya attacking Herman. Alex, standing nearby, was trying to defend Herman. The chimps were screaming and their arms were flailing, and Bamboo was chasing Herman and beating him with his fists. Lee Ann and the other keepers were trying to break it up. They coaxed Alex and Rukiya and the other females into the night house. They brought out hoses and sprayed Bamboo. But nothing stopped his aggression. Herman was clearly losing. Even as he defended himself, the keepers could see him fading. Soon Herman was on the ground, sitting cross-legged, slumped over, his head down. He was not moving, even as Bamboo pounded him.