Zoo Story (28 page)

All of it was a sideshow that distracted attention from the deeper questions of what kind of zoo Lowry Park should be and how it should evolve and what role it might play, along with other institutions, in the future of life on Earth. How much in legal fees did the city of Tampa devote to its crusade against Lex? Imagine what those sums could have meant for any one of the species disappearing into oblivion every year.

Whatever offenses Lex committed,
they pale in comparison to the damage the human species is currently inflicting on the wildlife of this planet. In his book
The Future of Life
, the famed biologist E. O. Wilson surveys the waves of extinction wiping out species around the planet and calls Homo sapiens “the serial killer of the biosphere.”

Global warming. The melting of the polar ice caps. The poisoning of the seas and skies. The fires burning through the Amazon. Millions of us, driving our children to school, driving to the grocery, driving to work. For these and a hundred other reasons, many of the species at Lowry Park are on the brink of extinction in the wild. Some have already been pushed over the edge of that cliff.

In the forests of Panama, the golden frogs have all but vanished. None has been sighted in any of the breeding grounds that used to teem with their numbers, even inside the gorge the researchers called the Thousand-Frog Stream.

“I would say they are relics,” says Kevin Zippel, the biologist who is leading efforts to save the golden frog and other amphibian species around the world. “They’re on their way out.”

That morning in January 2005, when Kevin and Dustin and the other researchers climbed down into the gorge, was one of the last sightings of golden frogs in the wild.

Even in Africa,
time is running out.

Mick Reilly and his family are still watching over the elephants and the black rhinos and the lions and all the other species that have been given sanctuary inside the game parks of Swaziland. Mick’s father, Ted, has been preserving the country’s wildlife for four decades. Mick has been at his father’s side, wading among the animals since he could walk. There’s a picture of him standing in the bush as a toddler, staring down a rhino.

Mick is thirty-nine now. All his life, he and his father have worked with the Swazi king to protect the animals. They have fought the politicians, the poachers, the killers who came into the parks in the early 1990s and mowed down the rhinos with machine guns, then cut out their horns and left their carcasses bleeding in the dirt.

At Mkhaya, the park reserved for Swaziland’s most endangered species, there are rows of great bleached skulls from those slaughtered rhinos. Bullet holes are still visible. Spend an afternoon with Mick and Ted, riding in a Land Rover through the twisting trails, and they will show you all that they have fought for, all that the rest of us are losing. Weaver nests, hanging from trees like paper sacks. Eagles turning in the blue dome of the sky.

Mick does not romanticize the savanna. He often hears tourists, wide-eyed, waxing on about the balance of nature.

“There’s no such thing,” says Mick, sitting at the wheel of the Land Rover. “There never has been. There’s no balance, because it’s always in a state of change.”

He talks about the swath that nature cuts through animal populations, wiping them out with a drought or a flood or disease. Not to mention the destruction wreaked by humans. As he says these things, a herd of zebras gallops along the horizon behind him, followed by a herd of wildebeests.

“Nature,” says Mick, quoting his father, “plays no favorites.”

Today, seven years after
the eleven elephants were sent to San Diego and Tampa, the herds they left behind still threaten to overrun the game parks of Swaziland. More calves have been born. Poachers have been kept away. There are now thirty-seven elephants in the parks—almost the same number as in 2003, when the eleven were sent to the United States. As before, the herds are tearing down almost every tree in sight. Some of these trees are three centuries old. When they die, they are not easily replaced.

“In the span of a man’s lifetime,” says Ted, “that vegetation will never come back.”

The Reillys are back to the same quandary. They know they can’t let the elephants continue to destroy so many trees. But they don’t want to be forced to kill off any of the herds. They are experimenting with contraception; there have been recent advances in elephant vasectomies. Just last year, a specialist from Disney’s Animal Kingdom worked with a team of other veterinarians to surgically sterilize seven bulls from Mkhaya and Hlane. The Reillys are cautiously optimistic about this development. They are also open to the idea of sending more elephants to an American zoo where they will be well-treated.

Mick and his father don’t want to be dragged into another controversy. They just want to find an answer that makes some kind of sense.

Late one afternoon, the two of them are together as a ranger drives them along another dirt road inside Mkhaya. The elephants are nowhere in sight. The question of what should be done with them seems far away. Mick and Ted are content to enjoy the last golden hours of the day. They pass warthogs hurrying through the bush. They find a female rhino who has just given birth in the grass.

At dusk, they stop at a watering hole where the hippos float and bellow in the purple water. In the gathering darkness, father and son listen, enveloped in silence. Then it’s time to go.

“
Chubeka,
” Mick tells the driver.
Carry on.

“Let us chase the sun,” says Ted.

My thanks to Yann Martel, whose beautiful novel Life of Pi made me want to chronicle daily life inside a zoo. I read
Life of Pi
in the summer of 2003, just as Lowry Park was preparing to transport the elephants from Swaziland, and when I saw news accounts of the court battle and the marathon flight, I knew the zoo was ripe for exploration.

I am indebted to Lowry Park’s administration and staff, past and present, for allowing me to wander inside their world for so long—especially Lex Salisbury, Craig Pugh, Heather Mackin, Rachel Nelson, Trish Rothman, Larry Killmar, Andrea Schuch, Kevin McKay, David Murphy, Jeff Ewelt, Melinda Mendolusky, Brian French, Steve Lefave, Dustin Smith, Virginia Edmonds, Bob Scheible, Brian Morrow, Dan Costell, Kelly Ryder, Pam Noel, Brian Czarnik, and Carie Peterson. I am also indebted to many others outside the zoo, including Ed and Roger Schultz, Maggie Messitt, Monica Ross, Elena Sheppa, Don Woodman, Ian Kruger, Kevin Zippel, David Gardner, and Jeff and Coleen Kremer, and to the family of Char-Lee Torre. I thank Peter Wrege and Katy Payne at Cornell’s Elephant Listening Project for lending me their expertise as they read over my sections on elephant communication and behavior. I am especially grateful to Mick and Ted Reilly for helping me understand how they got elephants to fly and for showing me Mkaya and Hlane. My heartfelt thanks to Lee Ann Rottman for her unwavering patience with a reporter who, in the beginning at least, was afraid of animals. By the time we were done, she had me cradling a baby chimp.

This book is based on a series originally published in the
St. Petersburg Times
, and I would like to thank everyone in that remarkable newsroom whose support made that work and this book possible, including Paul Tash, Neil Brown, Stephen Buckley, Patty Cox, Patty Yablonski, Nikki Life, Dawn Cate, Lane DeGregory, Kevin McGeever, Tim Nickens, Desiree Perry, Boyzell Hosey, Gretchen Letterman, and Jill Wilson, gone but not forgotten. I am deeply grateful to Alex Zayas, Ben Montgomery, Don Morris, and Kelley Benham, whose reporting on the escape of the patas monkeys and on Lex Salisbury’s downfall informs so much of the book’s final chapters. Special thanks to Kelley for her patience, advice, and ferocious line revisions. She remains the Enshalla of editors. Also to Stefanie Boyar, who snapped hundreds of startling images during all those years I was taking notes, including the cover photo of Rango, and to my editors Neville Green and Mike Wilson, whose insights and sensibilities shaped my reporting from start to finish.

Special thanks to my agent, Jane Dystel, and my editor at Hyperion, Gretchen Young, as well as her assistant, Elizabeth Sabo, all of whom helped me reimagine this work and coax it into a book. Also to Bridget Nickens at the University of South Florida, who graciously assisted me with research; to Patsy Sims and the rest of my colleagues at Goucher College’s creative nonfiction MFA program, who indulged me with their enthusiasm through six summers of my working on this project; and to Brad Hamm, the dean of Indiana University’s journalism school, whose support and vision kept me going during the home stretch. Also to Stephanie Hayes and Mallary Tenore for their eagle eyes as they read over the manuscript. And to Anne Hull and David Finkel for decades of listening and prodding.

I am grateful to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which gave me a quiet home where I could write and pace, and thoughtful colleagues who offered friendship and guidance. My humble gratitude to Karen Dunlap, Butch Ward, Keith Woods, Chip Scanlan, Jeff Saffan, and finally David Shedden, who tracked down hundreds of articles for me. I am indebted, as always, to my mentor and brother Roy Peter Clark, who was writing his own book down the hall at Poynter and who urged me on every step of the way, often materializing at my office door with a few words of encouragement just as the sun was rising over Tampa Bay.

Deepest thanks and love to my sons, Nat and Sam, and my wife, Kelley, for their inspiration and neverending support. I owe them everything.

For further details on the sources listed in these notes, see the Bibliography on page 281.

1  THE NEW WORLD

    
1
    
Eleven elephants. One plane:
The scene from the 747 was reconstructed from the author’s interviews with Mick Reilly and Chris Kingsley, the only two humans in the cargo hold with the elephants as they traveled from Johannesburg to Tampa.

    
4
    
elephants loom like great gray ghosts:
The author was in the Land Rover, reporting in Mkhaya in April 2007, when this incident occurred with the elephants and the bushwillow.

    
6
    
The conflict unfolds in miniature inside Swaziland:
The history of the Reilly family and of the reintroduction of wildlife to Mlilwane, Hlane, and Mkhaya are based largely on author interviews with Ted and Mick Reilly.

    
6
    
an old jeep named Jezebel:
Cristina Kessler,
All the King’s Animals: The Return of Endangered Wildlife to Swaziland
, page 21.

    
7
    
Their armored captive was groggy:
Cristina Kessler,
All the King’s Animals
, page 21.

    
8
    
miles of dead trees:
From the author’s firsthand reporting in Swaziland in 2007.

    
9
    
“Kahle mfana”:
Mick Reilly recounted this dialogue to the author, writing out both the original lines in siSwati and the English translations.

  
10
    
so corrosive it can eat through metal:
Holly T. Dublin and Leo S. Niskanen, editors of “IUCN/SSC AfESG Guidelines for the
in situ
Translocation of the African Elephant for Conservation Purposes,” page 38.

  
12
    
elephant culls had long been a reality:
This chapter’s lengthy description of the history and methodology of culls in different African countries is gathered from numerous sources, including “Lethal Management of Elephants,” a chapter written by Rob Slotow and others for
Elephant Management: A Scientific Assessment for South Africa,
by R. J. Scholes and Kathleen Mennell;
Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality of Conscience
, edited by Christen Wemmer and Catherine A. Christen; Dale Peterson’s
Elephant Reflections;
Raman Sukumar’s
The Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology, Behavior and Conservation
; Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton’s
Battle for the Elephants
; Katy Payne’s
Silent Thunder
; and Cynthia Moss’s
Elephant Memories.

  
12
    
The brutal choreography evolved:
To describe the history of elephant culls inside Kruger National Park, the author also relied on the chapter on elephant management, authored by Ian J. Whyte, Rudi J. van Aarde, and Stuart L. Pimm, in
The Kruger Experience: Ecology and Management of Savanna Heterogeneity
edited by Johan T. Du Toit and Kevin H. Rogers, pp. 332–348; numerous sections of Salomon Joubert’s massive
The Kruger National Park: A History
, especially volumes one and two; and “Assessment of Elephant Management in South Africa,” a powerpoint presentation authored by dozens of elephant researchers, delivered on February 25, 2008.

  
13
    
the use of Scoline was prohibited:
“Elephant Culling’s Cruel and Gory Past,” an article posted on the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s Web site.

  
13
    
“Don’t ask me if I enjoyed it”:
This quote and the description of vultures and hyenas waiting for the disposal teams to finish are taken from Fred Bridgland’s article, “5,000 Elephants Must Die. Here’s Why,”
Sunday Herald
, October 24, 2004.

  
14
    
drawn to the remains of their kin:
Cynthia Moss,
Elephant Memories
, pp. 73–74, 270–271.

  
14
    
elephants pushed their way into the shed:
Mary Battiata, “The Imperiled Realm of the Elephant: Africa’s Thinning Herds, Locked in a Struggle for Survival,”
Washington Post
, March 15, 1988.

  
15
    
as though they were investigating:
Dale Peterson,
Elephant Reflections
, p. 244.

  
15
    
elephants ninety miles from a cull:
Cynthia Moss,
Elephant Memories
, pp. 315–316; “Lethal Management of Elephants,” p. 298; also Battiata’s “The Imperiled Realm of the Elephant,”
Washington Post
, March 15, 1988.

  
15
    
believed to be capable of hearing storms:
This description of elephants’ ability to communicate over great distances is based on numerous sources, including Katy Payne’s
Silent Thunder
; Joyce Poole’s
Elephants;
Caitlin O’Connell’s
The Elephant’s Secret Sense
; Cynthia Moss’s
Elephant Memories
; W. R. Langbauer Jr.’s “Elephant Communication” in the journal
Zoo Biology
; “Unusually Extensive Networks of Vocal Recognition in African Elephants,” by Karen McComb and others, in
Animal Behaviour
; “African Elephant Vocal Communication I: Antiphonal Calling Behaviour among Affiliated Females,” by Joseph Soltis and others in
Animal Behaviour
; and “Rumble Vocalizations Mediate Interpartner Distance in African Elephants,
Loxodonta Africana
,” by Katherine A. Leighty and others, also in
Animal Behaviour
. Two of the most helpful sources I discovered on this subject were the Web site for ElephantVoices, an organization run by Joyce Poole and Petter Grannli, and the site for the Elephant Listening Project at Cornell, founded by Katy Payne and now directed by Peter Wrege.

  
15
    
“a throbbing in the air”:
Katy Payne,
Silent Thunder
, p. 20.

  
16
    
ears stiffened and spread wide:
Elephants have exhibited this behavior while listening to low-frequency calls, as has been chronicled in “African Elephants Respond to Distant Playbacks of Low-Frequency Conspecific Calls,” an article by William R. Langbauer Jr., and others, from the
Journal of Experimental Biology
; and “Responses of Captive African Elephants to Playback of Low-Frequency Calls,” by Langbauer and Payne and others, in the
Canadian Journal of Zoology
, among other sources.

  
16
    
orphans had wreaked havoc:
This phenomenon has been repeatedly chronicled in multiple sources, including Charles Siebert’s “An Elephant Crackup?”
New York Times
, October 8, 2006.

  
17
    
then San Diego and Lowry Park made sense:
Author interviews with Ted and Mick Reilly, as well as Lex Salisbury.

  
18
    
a helicopter crew darted every elephant:
This description of how the elephants were darted, assessed, and moved to the boma is based on the author’s interviews with the Reillys, Lex Salisbury, and Brian French.

  
18
    
performed field sonograms:
Based on author interviews with the Reillys, also “Reproductive Evaluation in Wild African Elephants Prior to Translocation,” by Thomas B. Hildebrandt and others, from the proceedings of a 2004 joint conference of the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians, the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians, and the Wildlife Disease Association, pp. 75–76.

  
18
    
Two of the females were pregnant:
Andrea Moss, “Elephant Pregnancies Spark New Concerns,”
North County Times
, July 15, 2003.

  
18
    
protesting and organizing letter-writing campaigns:
The opposition of the animal-rights coalition has been documented in numerous articles, including “The Swazi 11: A Case Study in the Global Trade in Live Elephants,” a paper presented by Adam M. Roberts and Will Travers at the XIXth International Congress of Zoology in August 2004 in Beijing; Kathy Steele, “Experts Oppose Importing Elephants to American Zoos,”
Tampa Tribune
, July 3, 2003; and Graham Brink, “4 Elephants from Africa Arrive at Zoo,”
St. Petersburg Times
, August 23, 2003.

  
18
    
“If the elephants are euthanized”:
From a transcript of a hearing on August 6, 2003, in front of U.S. District Judge John D. Bates.

  
19
    
“consider them as sentient beings”:
from an open letter written by Dr. Cynthia Moss and eight other researchers, sent on June 24, 2003 to San Diego Zoo and Lowry Park Zoo.

  
19
    
PETA offered to pay:
The efforts by PETA and the rest of the coalition to stop the elephant importation have been chronicled in numerous articles, on the Web sites of some of these groups, in public statements by their representatives, and in various court documents, including a Memorandum Opinion filed on August 8, 2003 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Civil Action No. 03-1497; and in the Plaintiffs-Appellants’ Emergency Motion for an Injunction Pending Appeal, filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Case No. 03-5216.

  
20
    
thronged together to push her through the fence:
Author interview with Mick Reilly.

2  THE AUDACITY OF CREATION

  
22
    
thumping fists on steering wheels:
The author witnessed this scene repeatedly throughout 2003 during morning rush hour traffic jams on I-275 at the Sligh Avenue exit.

  
23
    
The zoo was a living catalogue:
My thoughts on this point were guided by the introduction to Eric Baratay’s and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier’s
Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West
, pp. 7–13.

  
24
    
whimpered like a puppy:
Author observation during reporting with Pam Noel, assistant curator in charge of the zoo’s Asia section.

  
24
    
bestowing the animals with
Star Wars
names:
Author interviews with Kevin McKay, Pam Noel, Lee Ann Rottman, Virginia Edmonds, and Andrea Schuch.

  
25
    
frogs and toads were dying off:
Author interviews with Kevin Zippel.

  
25
    
A parade of raptors:
This scene, including the details on Myrtle’s release and the dream of her return, are based on the author’s reporting inside the birds of prey building and his interviews with Jeff Ewelt, who released the dove behind his home, and with Melinda Mendolusky, who shared her dream.

  
27
    
unloaded a large mound of horse manure:
James Steinberg, “Heavy Security Awaited Elephants,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 23, 2003; also “PETA Protests Pachyderms with Poo,” 10News.com, posted to Web site on August 22, 2003.

  
28
    
living proof that visionaries can be hell:
This description of Lex Salisbury is based on the author’s several years of observing and interviewing Salisbury, as well as the author’s interviews with multiple members of Lowry Park’s staff, past and present. Also based on an audit the city of Tampa ordered in 2008 to assess Salisbury’s leadership.

  
29
    
bush khakis and a safari hat:
Salisbury wore this garb in many issues of Lowry Park’s
Zoo Chatter
, in the zoo’s annual reports, and on the cover of the
Maddux Business Report
, in the fall of 2008, beside the headline “A W
ild
T
hing
.”

  
29
    
“resembles the great white hunter”:
Jeff Klinkenberg, “Wolf Pact: Endangered Red Wolves Find a Haven at Lowry Park Zoo,”
St. Petersburg Times,
March 11, 1990.

  
29
    
“El Diablo Blanco”:
The nickname was shared during several author interviews with Lowry Park staffers and was confirmed during an author interview with Lex Salisbury.

  
30
    
a tiny menagerie:
Account of zoo’s early history based on information from the zoo’s Web site, as well as numerous news articles over the years.

  
30
    
undisputed star in those early years:
“Animal Parade a Fun Idea,”
St. Petersburg Times
, June 23, 1965.

  
30
    
threw food over a fence:
“Lowry Park Safeguards Its Guests,”
St. Petersburg Times
, July 5, 1966.

  
30
    
stoplights on Happy Drive:
“Kids Do Driving on ‘Polite Boulevard,’ ” United Press International article, published in the
St. Petersburg Times
, November 28, 1966.

  
30
    
“a children’s paradise”:
“Nature Trail: Stark Contrast,”
Evening Independent
, May 31, 1965.

  
30
    
Sheena the elephant was shipped off:
“Elephant Dies of Heart Attack,”
St. Petersburg Times
, January 30, 1986.

  
30
    
“It was a rat hole”:
Christopher Goffard, “Zoo Will Add a World of New Life,”
St. Petersburg Times,
May 29, 2001.

  
32
    
Disney’s armies of Imagineers:
Some readers may be aware that the publishing house for this book is also owned by Disney. The author wishes to note that he included the description of the theme park entirely on his own, long before his publisher had any idea such a passage would be part of the manuscript. The author included this section not as an endorsement of Animal Kingdom but because it would be virtually impossible to chronicle Lowry Park’s recent history without discussing its place among other major animal attractions in central Florida.