Zoo Story (20 page)

One morning that spring,
Andrea Schuch was giving a talk on chimpanzees when a visitor said something troubling. Andrea had just explained that chimps are humans’ closest genetic relative when a little girl, listening on, shook her head.

“No, they’re not,” said the child. “Because God made us.”

Andrea knew there was no point in arguing. But for days, the exchange stuck with her. Even though the girl had obviously been repeating what her parents or another adult had taught her, she had posed an almost timeless question. For centuries, Aristotle and Descartes and other philosophers after them have debated whether animals possessed souls, or reason, or enough sentience to grant them any rights. But for Andrea, the answer was obvious. After her time at the zoo, she could not accept the notion that animals stood outside the sight of God.

“Are you going to tell me that they don’t have souls and a place in heaven? That seems very wrong.”

Sometimes, when she sat by the window of the orangutan exhibit, Rango would plop down on the other side of the glass, only a few inches away. He would look into her eyes, and she would look into his, and she could feel him gazing into her core.

No, Rango definitely had a soul. So did Herman, and Rukiya, and the others, too.

Andrea was sure of it.

The final days
before the debut of Safari Africa were somehow both chaotic and exhilarating. Brian Morrow gave instructions nonstop on both his walkie-talkie and his cell phone. Brian French and the rest of the Africa staff pushed through a stream of last-minute tasks, sweat dripping down their faces. One of the warthogs briefly escaped. The giraffes balked at leaving their barn. A bongo antelope proved so skittish, the staff had to calm him with a small dose of a sedative.

Then, just when it seemed the zoo had been pushed beyond capacity, everything fell into place. At the unveiling, Lex posed for the TV cameras with Mayor Iorio and other dignitaries, all of them holding giant scissors for the cutting of the ribbon draped before the entrance of the tunnel that led to the elephants and the rest of the new animals. Iorio had left her zebra-print jacket at home. Instead she donned a safari hat.

“I think we should celebrate these elephants,” she said, turning to Lex in front of the crowd that waited behind the dignitaries. “Where are they? Are they back there?”

Lex grinned. “Yeah.”

“Are they happy?”

A bigger grin. “Yeah.”

Someone counted to three, and the ribbon fell, and the crowd spilled forward. Emerging from the tunnel into the light, a little girl spied the warthogs and yelled “Pumbaa!” The crowd moved on to the bongo and the hornbills and the crowned cranes and the zebras, and finally to the overlook above the elephant yards, where Ellie and Matjeka were walking together, ears flapping, tails swishing, every giant step and every curlicue of their trunks registering on the faces of all the humans literally gasping with delight.

Lex stood back and studied the reactions and never stopped smiling.

In the rush of that morning,
a rumor spread through some of the visitors. When asked if it was true, Lee Ann nodded.

Ellie was pregnant.

Now came days of jubilation, months of fiscal glory. A summer of splendor at the ticket windows, of overflowing revenue streams and vaulting growth projections, all fueled by the legions of tots, sun-scorched but happy as they waved at their new best friends, Mr. Warthog and Mr. Giraffe. With the blockbuster opening of Safari Africa, 2004 reigned as the most luminous year in Lowry Park’s history.

The news of Ellie’s pregnancy only fueled expectations. The nineteen-year-old elephant wasn’t due until late 2005. But if she successfully delivered, her baby would draw even more visitors and confirm that Lowry Park could breed its fledgling herd. A calf would solidify Ellie’s standing as the matriarch. Brian French and Steve Lefave were increasing Ellie’s vitamins and exercising her in the yards and in the pool. They were also brainstorming ways to avert catastrophe during the birth. Calves born in captivity are sometimes stillborn or die within the first twenty-four hours. The mother elephant, usually a first-time mother, can get confused and attack the newborn. Isolated from her species for most of her life, Ellie’s inexperience was especially profound. She had never given birth or witnessed another female elephant delivering. She had never even seen a calf.

Somehow, the humans would have to coach her. They had to prepare Ellie for when the contractions traveled through her and then a strange, squirming creature dropped from her womb.

As if to confirm
Lowry Park’s new prominence, the zoo was invited that December to show off its animals on
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
. Jeff Ewelt and Melinda Mendolusky, the birds-of-prey keepers who led the daily animal shows, were the obvious choices to ferry a sampling of creatures to New York.

They left a couple of days before the show—Jeff and Melinda and their spouses in a van and a truck hooked to a trailer. Since they didn’t know which animals Conan would pick to appear on camera, they brought a bounty: a black-headed python, a chinchilla, two New Guinea singing dogs, cave-dwelling spiders from Tanzania, plus Smedley the vulture and Ivan the Eurasian eagle owl. Finally, there was Jeff and Melinda’s new favorite, Arnold the show-stealing pig. If a pig could be a mutt, Arnold qualified. He was a mixed breed, only three years old, six hundred pounds and counting. He had been someone’s pet, but then he grew so massive that his owner donated him to the zoo. Jeff and Melinda had cast him for the grand finale of their birds-of-prey show. The audience cheered when he lumbered into view. Now he dozed in the back of the trailer, ensconced in hay, bound for stardom. The zoo had even brought him a little blanket to wear while on the air. One side was emblazoned with
lowry park zoo, tampa bay.
The other declared
i
♥
ny
.

The journey northward played like a hybrid of
The Odyssey
and
Wild Kingdom
, with a dash of
Green Acres
. They drove for two days and most of two nights and got caught in traffic near Savannah and in an ice storm in the Carolinas. When they reached a fresh snowfall outside Rocky Mount, they pulled to the side of the highway and let the singing dogs out to relieve themselves. The dogs, who had never seen snow before, were mystified at first but soon jumped and rolled in the powder, their breath making tiny clouds.

The night before the show, they checked into a Best Western in Hackensack and snuck the menagerie into their rooms. The singing dogs, a nocturnal species, romped through the night in one room with Jeff and his wife; Ivan the eagle owl perched at the foot of Melinda’s bed. Arnold was too big to bring inside so they piled more hay around him in the van and wrapped him in a comforter.

The next morning, December 28, they ventured into the jungle of Manhattan, shrouded in blackened icicles and toxic slush and a bone-deep chill. Unbeknownst to the animals, they were headed into one of the cradles of modern civilization—a towering stone temple dedicated to human ambition and pride and the sacrament of the profit motive: Rockefeller Center. Once they found their way to the building and parked in the basement, they ran into an unexpected obstacle. To reach the show’s sixth-floor studio, Arnold had to ride the elevator. To get to the elevator, he had to scale a ramp and then walk down a long concrete corridor, an extremely difficult challenge for a giant pig.

“You ready to walk, Arnold?” said Melinda. “This way, Arnie!”

They pushed him up the ramp and then laid out a long piece of rubber matting so he wouldn’t slip and urged him on with a trail of marshmallows and powdered doughnuts. The pig hesitated, squealed, tried to turn around. The quest to reach the elevator exhausted him. A crowd gathered just in time to see him evacuate his massive bowels.

“He does what he wants, huh?” said a bystander, backing away from the smell. Jeff and Melinda and their spouses quickly cleaned the mess, then Arnold resumed his slow march, walking in tiny steps like a woman in a tight skirt.

Onto the elevator and up to the sixth floor they rode. Finally they established a base camp on the linoleum floor of the studio’s hallway. As extras and crew members hurried back and forth, they all stopped at the sight of Arnold, stretched out in a fresh new bed of hay.

“Wow.”

“He’s like Jabba the Hutt!”

Nearly everyone was sucked into Arnold’s mighty gravitational field. A pneumatic blonde, wearing jeans so tight they could cause gangrene, flirted with him. Max Weinberg, the drummer who led Conan’s house band when not on tour with Bruce Springsteen, knew a star when he saw one and stopped to give the pig his regards. Weinberg, a gentleman, made no jokes about bacon, as so many others did. The only person who did not betray the slightest reaction to Arnold’s presence was the show’s famous host. A thin and almost spectral figure, Conan passed several times without even glancing at the pig sprawled two feet away. The network icon appeared lost inside some preshow fugue state, avoiding eye contact and conversation with everyone in the crowded hallway until he sighted the blonde. Immediately he stopped to chat her up. The prerogative of the alpha, flaunted once again.

The rest of the day zipped by. At rehearsal, the animals were brought onto the set to audition for Conan’s consideration. Almost immediately the singing dogs and the vulture were rejected. The others were in, time permitting; Arnold was deemed so spectacular that the show’s staff wanted to bring him on last for the segment’s climax. To Jeff’s and Melinda’s dismay, someone suggested that perhaps Conan should ride on Arnold’s back during the show. Luckily, the host declined.

“I’m good, thanks.”

At showtime, Conan made his entrance to raucous hoots and hollers. Suddenly, the gaunt shadow of the hallway was gone, transformed into another man so electric, he seemed to light the studio on his own. During his monologue, he told the audience that he had some unusual guests waiting backstage.

“There are animals,” he said. “They are dangerous. We could all be killed.”

More laughter. More approval.

When Jeff and Melinda brought out Lowry Park’s animals, Conan knew what to do. He draped the python around his neck and let one of the cave-dwelling spiders crawl up his chest and onto his wrist.

“It’s taking my pulse,” said Conan.

Through a fortuitous accident, Ivan the eagle owl stole the night. Ivan was supposed to fly from Jeff’s wife to Conan—they’d practiced it that afternoon—but the mouse tidbit in Conan’s glove fell out, and so Ivan ignored the command. Instead he spread his great wings and circled back over the heads of the audience to rapturous applause. Through it all, Arnold bided his time, in position behind the curtain as he waited to deliver the segment’s big finale. But before his moment came, time ran out, and the show went to commercial.

Just like that, it was over. Arnold had traveled the length of the country, shivered through a cold night in New Jersey, and been hauled into a metropolis of honking cabs and strange subterranean smells—the last place on Earth designed for a pig. He had struggled to find his way down a long and perilous hallway, so slippery it made him squeal, endured the condescension of the glitterati, and then been led in and out of a cavernous space that boomed with the roar of humans and burned with the glare of who knows how many tiny suns—all for nothing. In the end, he had been upstaged by an owl.

“Poor Arnold,” someone said.

With Melinda and Jeff leading him on a leash, he slowly made his way back to the elevator. By now it was late and the pig was growing restless and cranky. Back in the studio, just before the show ended, someone prevailed upon Conan to give Arnold another chance. A remote camera crew caught up with him in the basement, deep into his plodding retreat.

This was the chance the pig and his handlers had labored toward for so long. At last, Arnold’s wet and whiskered snout would appear on national TV and the zoo would cap another triumph. When the show aired after midnight, more than two million Americans would watch Conan’s antics with the owl and the chinchilla and the spiders. For many in that vast audience, it would be the first time they had ever heard of Lowry Park. As the remote crew zoomed in, Arnold kept walking in his same short, halting steps away from the camera and the lights, toward the refuge of the trailer. He didn’t care about the Nielsens. He just wanted another doughnut.

A second jungle,
two thousand miles to the south. Marmosets chirped in the trees. Leaf-cutter ants marched through the underbrush in a winding column.

Dustin Smith was hiking through a tropical forest in central Panama, joining a team of researchers made up of biologists and other herps keepers from other American zoos. They had come to the forest in search of a vanishing species: the Panamanian golden frog. On a cool Tuesday morning in January 2005, Dustin and the others walked in single file, keeping an eye out for boa constrictors. A day or so earlier, in another part of the forest, they had found a fer-de-lance, a deadly viper. Now they climbed a hill scarred with lava flow from an old volcanic eruption, then negotiated their way down the other side, toward a gorge with a rushing stream—one of the last breeding grounds of the golden frog.

Of all the amphibians plunging toward extinction, the golden frog was among the most beautiful. With its bright yellow skin, dotted with deep black chevrons, it had long been Panama’s national symbol. The frog was believed to bring good luck; images of it hung on walls in restaurants. In gift shops, the shelves were crowded with tiny golden replicas. The souvenirs far outnumbered the real thing. As the Panamanian countryside had been paved over by developers, a lethal fungus known as chytrid had spread through the streams and rivers. The golden-frog population had been nearly wiped out. Less than two thousand remained in the wild.

“They’ll be extinct probably in five years,” said Kevin Zippel, the biologist who headed this project. “I don’t think there’s anything anybody can do to stop that.”

In recent years, Kevin and other researchers had gathered small numbers of golden frogs and sent them to zoos and aquariums around the United States. Some would soon be arriving at Lowry Park. Eventually, if a defense against the fungus could be found, biologists hoped to reintroduce golden frogs back into the forest, provided there was any forest left. The odds were not good. Once these last holdouts in Panama died off, the species was almost certainly fated to live out its time on Earth inside tiny rooms at zoos and aquariums.

“Is that right?” Kevin said. “I don’t know.”

Around the planet, so many amphibian species were headed toward extinction that there was no way to preserve a genetic sampling of them all through captivity. Researchers could not get to them in the wild quickly enough. Even if they could, zoos didn’t have room for all the species, leaving Kevin and others to play God. Somehow, they had to decide which amphibian species would be saved and which would be allowed to vanish.

“Is that right?” Kevin said again.
“I don’t know.”

The golden frog had been selected for survival in captivity. Kevin and Dustin and the rest of this team had come to Panama to chronicle the frogs’ last stand. They wanted to see how many were still hanging on. If they found any, they would take skin swabs to determine if the frogs were infected with chytrid. In their first two weeks in the forest, the team had encountered a breathtaking array of wildlife—toucans and peccaries and caimans, acacia ants and scorpions, a green parrot snake and a three-toed sloth, a porcupine, even some basilisks, better known as Jesus lizards for their ability to skitter across the top of water. One day, some of the leaf-cutter ants found their way into Kevin’s backpack and sliced through his shirt and pants and a belt. But Dustin and the others had found almost no golden frogs.

On this particular morning, they were hopeful. The stream waiting at the bottom of the gorge had historically been one of the best places to find golden frogs. The team called it the Thousand-Frog Stream because in previous years, when the goldens were breeding, the banks were so thick with them that it was hard to step anywhere without risking an awful squish. This morning as the researchers returned to the stream, there was no carpet of gold. Searching under leaves and in the crevices of the stones, they found only a handful of frogs.

Dustin saw one on the side of a mossy rock, then grabbed it. “This is definitely a female,” he said, pointing to the frog’s feet. She didn’t have any pads on the sides of her thumbs. “Nuptial pads,” they’re called, and only the males have them. They’re used to grip the female during breeding. Sometimes the male hangs on for weeks or even longer, waiting for her to lay her eggs so he can be the one to fertilize them. Cupped in Dustin’s hands, the female appeared tiny. Someone brought Q-tips to swab her. The samples were secured inside a tiny bottle, and then Dustin let her go.

This site, with the stream rushing over the rocks along the high walls of the gorge, seemed so idyllic, so complete in its hushed perfection, that it felt like an ecstatic vision. Shafts of sunshine, piercing the canopy, fell on the water like light through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral. Vines hung everywhere, bursting with purple orchids. Spiderwebs glistened. A morpho butterfly appeared over the stream. As it fluttered into one of the shafts of light from above, its wings erupted with a metallic, iridescent blue. For a few moments, as the morpho moved from light to shadow and then back into light, the brilliant color flashed on, then off, then on again.