Zoo Story (9 page)

The high-pitched calls were both beautiful and enigmatic. It was easy to wonder what the sirens were communicating at that moment, what the calls sounded like to them rippling through the water. Whatever the message, perhaps Loo was listening too.

Summer was over,
allegedly. According to the calendar, it was now October. But a stroll through Lowry Park still felt like a tour through the inner chambers of a giant kiln. By midmorning, an invisible shroud of heat settled over the grounds. It reflected off the walkways that curved past babirusa digging with their tusks and muntjacs darting in the shadows, and shimmered over the placid green water of the moats surrounding the ring-tailed lemurs and the Colobus monkeys, and burned in the scrub pines where the zoo’s lone red wolf patrolled the fence at the edge of his exhibit, avoiding eye contact.

The inferno did not slow the stream of cars and minivans pouring into the front parking lots. Observing each new wave of visitors was like standing before an exhibit that endlessly renewed itself. The species on display, however, was hardly soft-spoken. Elementary schoolchildren tumbled out of buses, fidgeting and scratching without shame, the girls quickly bunching into whispered huddles as they reinforced old alliances or established new ones, the boys elbowing and pushing as they maneuvered for position in their secret hierarchies. Adult couples smooched and locked hands and giggled loudly at coded allusions, public proof of their private pair-bond and a warning against interference from any potential reproductive competitors. In biological terms, the signals they were sending could not have been more clear. Walking toward the ticket windows, they rubbed each other’s shoulders and brushed dirt and picked lint off each other’s shirts and ran their fingers through each other’s hair—all classic precoital grooming behavior. (Possibly postcoital.) Mothers and fathers lingered at the rear of their Expeditions and Escalades—glittering emblems not just of status but of their determination to protect the future of their genetic line—and unloaded strollers built like tanks, designer diaper bags overflowing with juice packets and sanitary wipes, and enough sunblock to slather an army. In their car seats, their toddlers waited to be waited upon, spoiled like so many young primates, whining and kicking their legs like tiny despots impatient for their retinue to convey them forward.

If the visitors were listening, they could already detect the roar of Eric, the male Sumatran tiger. Possibly he was restless, eager for his turn in the exhibit. Definitely he was sexually frustrated, since his attempts to court Enshalla had so far been met only with scorn. If the humans heard the roar, it was doubtful that they would have guessed what animal was making it, or why. The deep bass note repeated over and over, punctuating the morning. It didn’t sound like tigers in the movies. More like a bellow than a roar, it declared the presence of something vaguely big and clearly ferocious and maybe hungry. Perfect. Much more enticing than the jungle drums, still pounding from the loudspeakers.

As visitors paid their money and pushed through the turnstiles, the predictable soundtrack reassured them that what awaited inside was not true wildness but a carefully staged illusion of wildness. At an almost subliminal level, the true message of the drums was that the zoo’s staff would control the experience ahead and that all the leopards and bears and panthers—not to mention any tigers—were safely behind lock and key and would not be allowed, no matter how peckish they might feel, to snack on any children.

Lowry Park prided itself as an institution custom-made for families with young kids. Even though the zoo was growing, it remained compact enough that it was possible to take in the highlights in a couple of hours or less. This was no accident; the new zoo had been designed not to overwhelm. The size of the place was ideal for a four-year-old’s attention span. Moving at a reasonable clip and fortified with enough liquids to stave off heat stroke, parents could whisk their brood from one end to the other and be gunning for the exit just as the little one crashed into a blissful stupor. From start to finish, the experience was tailored for the delight of impressionable children. The front courtyard was graced with a fountain where manatee statues swam in the air and toddlers squealed with joy as they jumped through jets of burbling water. Wallaroo Station, featuring species from Australia, offered a rock-climbing wall for older kids. At Stingray Bay, over in the Aquatic Center, children reached inside a shallow tank and ran their fingers along the sleek backs of Southern stingrays whose tail barbs had been removed. Every day, families crowded into an outdoor theater for
Spirits of the Sky
, a birds-of-prey show where the handlers invited the guests to admire Smedley the vulture and cued Ivan the Eurasian eagle owl to fly directly over the audience, his massive wings flapping so close that the churning air ruffled their hair. Inside the Discovery Center, kids studied toxic toads up close and were allowed to fondle a replica of a raccoon dropping. For their birthdays, children were encouraged to celebrate at the zoo with their friends, pet a skink or snake, and play Pin the Tentacle on the Octopus. On special evenings, the zoo sponsored slumber parties where third-graders climbed into sleeping bags next to the underwater viewing windows, drifting off to the sight of the manatees swimming. At Halloween, preschoolers were invited to a camp with bats and tarantulas. At Christmas, they met real reindeer and a not-so-real Santa.

One of the most popular attractions, all year round, was the petting zoo, a dusty corral where children waded happily among bleating sheep and fed them grain pellets and ignored the teeth and gums pulling at their clothes. Unbeknownst to parents, the herd included a billy goat named Cody who had somehow mastered the art of contorting himself so he could urinate on his own head. To impress the nanny goats, of course.

“We call him Pee Goat,” a keeper said under her breath one day, maintaining a safe distance. “He’s disgusting.”

Many of the kids, no doubt, would have been ecstatic to learn of Cody’s special talent. They howled at the raccoon poop. Why not a malodorous goat? From a child’s perspective, nothing could have been more enchanting.

Perched on a branch,
two golden lion tamarins peered out with their tiny old-men faces, chirping as though they were birds, not tiny monkeys.

With silky, reddish gold manes that swept backward toward their shoulders, the tamarins were among the most striking creatures at Lowry Park. Weighing less than two pounds each, Kevin and Candy did in fact look like miniature lions. If they could have growled, they would have been doing so right now, because they were in the middle of a heated argument with Lee Ann Rottman. The best they could do was glare at her.

“You see ’em?” said Lee Ann, shaking her head as she pointed them out.

The curator and the defiant monkeys were facing off inside the zoo’s free flight aviary. Knowing how much the public loves tamarins, Lowry Park had long kept a pair of them inside the giant screened enclosure along with the emerald starlings and the masked lapwings and all the other birds. In their native forests of Brazil, tamarins lived in the canopy and nested inside holes in the tree trunks; at Lowry Park they roamed through the oaks of the aviary and slept in a camouflaged Igloo cooler that hung high among the branches. For years, another pair of tamarins had lived in peaceful coexistence with the birds and the human visitors, but recently they had grown too old and the staff had replaced them with Kevin and Candy. The two newcomers had become a headache, because they had chosen to spend their days on a branch that hung too close to the sidewalk that led guests through the trees. Much smaller than the average housecat, the tamarins were relatively harmless. But their teeth were sharp and they had been known to bite when their keepers approached to feed them crickets or fruit. The zoo had posted a sign warning not to touch the monkeys, but they were too cute to resist and too feisty to be trusted. Sooner or later, somebody was likely to get a hand chomped.

The keepers had tried everything they could think of to make Kevin and Candy abandon the low-hanging branch and choose another perch farther from the sidewalk. They had even collected some of Eric the tiger’s urine from his den and used it to spray the area, hoping the pungent menace of his scent would intimidate the monkeys. No luck. Nothing seemed to scare them, even the two boat-billed herons who grew agitated one day when Kevin and Candy wandered too close to the large birds’ nest.

“They were clacking at them,” said Lee Ann. “The tamarins didn’t care.”

Candy, the female, was especially territorial. She didn’t like taking orders from other species, no matter how much they dwarfed her. Whenever the keepers drew near, she retaliated with angry chatter. She was doing it now to the acting curator.

“She’s a little bitchy,” said Lee Ann.

Obviously Kevin and Candy were not destined to be permanent residents of the aviary. The staff would have to move them back to their previous home, a smaller enclosure with other tamarins and marmosets in Primate World. It was just one more task for Lee Ann’s never-ending to-do list. She was the ultimate troubleshooter, constantly dealing with the neuroses and complaints and quirks and insecurities and problems of multiple species. If a baby chimp was forsaken by its birth mother, Lee Ann found it a surrogate. If one of the Sarus cranes lost its appetite or a kangaroo suffered a miscarriage, she needed to know why. If an orangutan hurled her droppings at a bank president or the Bactrian camels humped again in front of the second-grade field trip, she heard about it. If one of her keepers was going through a divorce or couldn’t take another day of beak-pecking from the emus, typically they ended up crying in her office. Sometimes the humans acted like animals—not necessarily a bad thing in her view—and sometimes the animals behaved like complicated humans. All of it was her problem.

In a zoo, where dominance is often maintained through physical size and brute force, Lee Ann was a remarkably small and delicate alpha. Five feet tall, with a slight build and a natural shyness, she appeared almost frail. In reality, she possessed reserves of strength and resilience that had sustained her through emergencies most people could not imagine. Over the years, she had periodically taken leaves from the zoo to study and work with wild chimps in Uganda and Cameroon, and during her travels she had contracted typhoid, amoebic dysentery, and cerebral malaria. One day, as she and a group of other people were floating on a river in inner tubes, a hippo surfaced directly beneath her boyfriend and dragged him in its jaws toward the river bottom. Hippos are much more dangerous than their ungainly appearance would suggest—in Africa, they kill more humans than lions and elephants combined—and as she watched her boyfriend going under, Lee Ann was screaming. She doesn’t know how long he was down there, but suddenly he broke free and reappeared above the surface, bleeding from huge bites to his torso. At the hospital, doctors determined that the hippo’s teeth had barely missed his spinal cord and femoral artery. During his recovery, Lee Ann slept on the floor beside his bed and held his hand as he hallucinated.

The boyfriend survived, but the relationship did not. Eventually Lee Ann returned to Lowry Park with a vivid new appreciation for just how dangerous animals could be. The zoo was a more controlled environment than the wilds of Africa, but the hazards and difficulties of the job could not be discounted, as had been demonstrated by the fatal elephant attack on Char-Lee Torre. Caring for the animals at Lowry Park was so demanding, both physically and emotionally, that many keepers only lasted a few years before moving on. Lee Ann had stayed for more than a decade, starting in the primate department and then working her way up through the ranks. Being curator was easily the hardest position she’d ever had. Whatever situation she was dealing with, a dozen others awaited her immediate attention. Her face was often streaked with sweat. Her boot soles were caked with the droppings of who knew how many species. It was an exhilarating, appalling, glorious mess of a job that devoured almost every moment of every day, from before dawn until after dark. It required her to be a general, a therapist, a mind-reader, a diplomat, and a den mother to almost seventeen hundred individuals, some of whom walked on four legs and could kill her without even trying.

One of Lee Ann’s favorites was Rango, the zoo’s only adult male orangutan. Stopping in front of Rango’s exhibit, she waxed on about what a good father he was to his young son and daughter, who at that moment were climbing in some netting nearby.

“He’s very handsome, I think,” she said. “He has the most sensitive eyes.”

Lately, though, Rango had been snubbing Lee Ann, avoiding eye contact with her. He was mad because she was so busy that she hadn’t come to see him lately. She felt guilty, but what could she do? With the opening of Safari Africa on the horizon, she was more swamped than ever, coordinating the arrival of giraffes and zebras and monitoring the progress of the four Swazi elephants and Ellie. Lowry Park had great hopes that these five would form the nucleus of a breeding herd. In the coming spring, before the new wing opened, the zoo planned to attempt an artificial insemination with Ellie. The two females from Swaziland were not yet old enough to safely get pregnant, and the two males were not yet tall enough to mount Ellie. Considering Ellie’s skittishness with her own species, no one could predict how she would react if one of the bulls tried to breed with her. The fact that she’d never mated or been pregnant before complicated her chances of being able to conceive in the future. Just as with humans, elephant females can develop endometriosis as they get older, leaving cysts and scar tissue that render them infertile; such health issues are especially prevalent in elephants who have never been pregnant. If the zoo wanted Ellie to have a baby, then she needed to do it soon. Already the staff was tracking her menstrual cycle to determine the optimal time for the AI and was consulting with two specialists from Berlin—Drs. Thomas Hildebrandt and Frank Göritz, the same two who had carried out the field sonograms in Swaziland. These two specialists had distinguished reputations, but at zoos around the world, they were known as “the Berlin boys.” Soon the zoo would fly them to Florida.