Zoo Story (24 page)

The Kremers were particularly concerned about several African penguins that Lowry Park had brought in for a new exhibit. The penguins, a warm-weather species from South Africa, had been held in a back area of the zoo while their exhibit was under construction. In the meantime, two of the penguins had died.

“You think this place is about education or the animals. You’re dead wrong,” said Jeff. “It’s about one thing and one thing only: money.”

The zoo fired back, tackling these charges one by one. Greg Stoppelmoor, the zoo’s assistant curator for the aviary, confirmed that two of the African penguins had died. Greg, who had previously worked with this group of penguins for years in Dallas, reported that the birds had both suffered from asper, a respiratory ailment common to the species. Their deaths, he said, had nothing to do with the move to Lowry Park.

Lee Ann and others confirmed that on a couple of occasions Tamani had briefly slipped out through openings in the cable fence around one of the elephant yards. He had never wandered far, they said; usually he stayed within a few feet of his mother, on the other side of the fence. As for the maintenance issues in the animals’ night houses, Lee Ann confirmed that repair schedules had been a bit hectic during the construction of Safari Africa. Since then, she said, the animal department had been given its own maintenance worker and was having no problem keeping up with work requests. Either way, she pointed out, the zoo’s facilities had always been safe. She noted that the USDA inspection immediately after Enshalla’s escape had found no problems with the locks or latches or anything else in the tiger night house.

“The zoo was not in disrepair,” said Lee Ann.

Lex, meanwhile, did not buy the argument that Enshalla’s death had anything to do with Lowry Park being overextended.

“We are not understaffed,” he said. “Enshalla got out because of human error.”

Lex remained unbowed. Late that September, when Lowry Park co-hosted the AZA convention in Tampa, he gave a triumphant speech summarizing the zoo’s efforts on behalf of endangered species. The audience was filled with his peers, men and women who understood what it was like to preside over the fate of so many creatures. There were no critics in the room, no reporters waiting to pounce. It was his moment, not theirs. Knowing this, he flashed the charm that had won over so many other alphas, and delivered a sermon of inspiration. He talked about how the Florida legislature had designated Lowry Park as a refuge for the state’s threatened species, recognizing its longstanding efforts to preserve whooping cranes and red wolves and Florida panthers and Key deer and Key Largo woodrats and, of course, manatees. Since the zoo’s manatee hospital opened more than fifteen years before, Lex pointed out, the staff had worked with 181 manatees and had returned 84 to the wild.

He talked about how the zoo was fighting for the preservation of thirty-three species managed by the AZA’s species survival plans, including orangutans and Komodo dragons. He talked about the project to save the Panamanian golden frogs, the zoo’s financial support for chimpanzee research in the wilds of the Congo, and its contributions to the survival of black rhinos and other endangered species in the game parks of Swaziland.

“This,” he said, “is what we should be doing.”

Waves of applause rose toward the ceiling. Engulfed in the validation of his tribe, Lex shook hands, accepted congratulations, waved to old friends. A month earlier, when the zoo had been staggering in the wake of both Herman’s and Enshalla’s deaths, he had seemed, for the first time ever, on the verge of losing control and possibly losing his job. Now he had regained his equilibrium and appeared more invincible than ever. For the foreseeable future, the zoo was Lex’s to rule. He would take it in whatever direction he saw fit.

The storm lost its thunder. Months went by, then a year. Lex ruled on. The keepers, seeing how it was, either quit—knowing they would be replaced soon enough—or they stayed and made whatever peace they could with the pay and the hours and the weight of someone else’s ambitions.

The zoo grew and grew, like a creature unto itself, insatiable. A stream of new animals poured through the back gates in vans and trailers and flatbed trucks to be unloaded and examined and duly logged into the registrar’s files. The collection was surging so quickly that it seemed as though Lowry Park was gathering all of creation.

The critics pounded away. On its Web site, PETA kept up their campaign against elephants in captivity. On their site, the Kremers chronicled every health-code violation at Lowry Park, every USDA citation, every lawsuit filed in circuit court, every news article on the zoo’s failings. They made no money from their efforts, but they thought it was important, and so they persisted.

Carie Peterson stayed out of it. She now preferred to concentrate on her job at the shelter, finding foster homes for abandoned cats and dogs. It didn’t pay much either, but the work felt right. Her home overflowed with a menagerie of her own—at last count, four dogs, four cats, three turtles, two chinchillas, two snakes, two blue-tongued skinks, one hamster, and one tarantula, not to mention assorted creatures she fostered on the side.

She tried not to think too much about her time at Lowry Park, about Enshalla and Naboo. But sometimes she couldn’t help it. Somewhere along the line, something had gone deeply wrong. In her view, money became more important than the animals. She wasn’t sure when the balance shifted. Maybe it was when they flew in the elephants from Swaziland. Maybe even before.

Whenever the subject of the zoo came up, Carie became a ghost. She avoided conversations about it, would not return phone calls from people who wanted to ask her about it. She refused to even drive past the place anymore.

Lex had learned
not to worry about the missiles fired at the walls of his kingdom. He paid little heed to the critics, the petitions calling for his firing, the blogs that still described him as a murderer. Zoos, he pointed out, had been a part of human culture since ancient Mesopotamia. They weren’t likely to go away anytime soon. Especially his zoo.

In the past five years, from 2003 to 2008, Lowry Park had become one of the fastest growing zoos in America. With annual attendance topping 1.2 million, the transformation that Lex had pushed for had become a reality. When he’d arrived in 1987, he said, Lowry Park had thirty-two animals. Now the collection contained approximately two thousand, representing more than three hundred species from around the world.

His blueprints called for more growth, more animals, more ways to put visitors close to as many species as possible. In a move that proved his ambitions had not dimmed, Lex had hired Larry Killmar, the deputy director of animal collections at the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Wild Animal Park. Already, Larry was talking about filling Lowry Park with more species, including gharial crocodiles, an endangered species from India.

The centerpiece of Lex’s reinvention of Lowry Park remained its fledgling elephant herd. Elephants were now the zoo’s official emblem and appeared on the cover of its annual reports, on the staff’s business cards, on the big sign out front that welcomed visitors. In recent years, several zoos around the country, especially in northern cities such as Detroit and Chicago, had closed their elephant exhibits, citing concerns about the animals’ well-being and the zoos’ inability to provide them a suitable habitat. In an online explanation for their decision, Detroit Zoo officials said they believed their elephants belonged in a warmer climate and that elephants would need, at a minimum, ten to twenty acres to roam. Without explicitly mentioning Lowry Park or San Diego, the Detroit officials questioned the practice of placing wild elephants in captivity.

It is unclear if the capture of wild elephants for exhibition in zoos is in fact a “rescue” if the elephants’ needs cannot be met by the captive facility.

The warmer temperatures of Florida were well suited to the elephants. But Lex acknowledged that Lowry Park’s growing herd would someday need more room. For now the elephants seemed to be doing well. Sdudla had been loaned to the Montgomery Zoo for breeding, and Ellie reigned as the matriarch. After those first shaky moments immediately after the birth, she had proved to be an excellent mother. Tamani was now two years old and weighed fifteen hundred pounds. He still nursed, but spent much of his time outside in the care of his aunts, Mbali and Matjeka. He swam in the elephant pool. He chased after guinea fowl.

Despite the critics’ jabs, the zoo’s conservation credentials were touted to be as strong as ever. An AZA spokesman said that the zoo’s conservation program “puts them among the best in the country.” The manatees still swam in front of the huge picture windows, surfacing like leviathans. The blue poison-dart frogs and Panamanian golden frogs were still breeding to the wailing of Led Zeppelin. Dan Costell, the hulking wrestler who had once waged war with Carie Peterson and other bunnyhuggers, still tenderly cared for the frogs, adjusting the mist and temperature in their small room, encouraging them to breed, stemming the tide of extinction. Dan and others in the herps department had also begun working with another endangered amphibian species, the Puerto Rican crested toad. Recently the toads had produced tadpoles. Some stayed at the zoo. Others were sent back to Puerto Rico to be reintroduced into the wild.

Even as the staff fought for threatened species, Lowry Park was evolving into a hybrid of a zoo and a theme park. Ten years before, almost the only ride offered had been the merry-go-round. Now there was the skyride, a pony trek, and an area where children could take spins in flying bananas. In an area once reserved for a herd of five bison, a water flume called Gator Falls had just opened. The bison were gone, replaced by screaming children.

Like any institution, Lowry Park had the right to move in new directions and seek new revenues. But the line between entertainment and conservation was growing increasingly fuzzy. The latest situation with the tigers was emblematic. Eric, the male Sumatran, still lived at Lowry Park. But with Enshalla dead, he had no mate. Zoo officials said they’d searched for another female Sumatran for him to breed with, but since they couldn’t find one, they were now talking about moving him elsewhere. Until they found him a new home, Eric was spending a great deal of time confined inside his den in the night house, because the zoo had brought in two white tigers who took turns with Eric sharing the exhibit. The available space had grown even more crowded when the female white tiger gave birth to three cubs. One was stillborn. The other two, now a year old and growing, wrestled and chased each other.

The white tigers were unquestionably beautiful, and there was no doubt that the public loved them. But they were also a genetic aberration, their coloring the result of a recessive gene. Even ardent supporters of zoos were scathing in their criticisms of institutions that exhibited white tigers. There was no conservation value to them, said the critics; the only reason for showing the species was because they’re a moneymaker.

Lex did not agree. He argued that the white tigers deserved the zoo’s attention, that the increased revenues they brought in would help fund the conservation efforts with manatees and other species. Besides, he said, there was nothing wrong in engaging the public with such captivating animals. Before you can educate people, he said, you had to get them through the front gates.

This much was certain:
Lex got results.

Repeatedly he had set his sights on something and then found a way to pull it off. As he entered his second decade at the zoo, his will never seemed to waver. He was one of those people who created his own weather. When he was having a good day and felt benevolent, he radiated a joy that enveloped everyone around him. He would beam, and they beamed with him. When he felt misunderstood or grew angry, he made it rain.

He dismissed his detractors with a story. One day, years before, he said, he had given a tour of Lowry Park to George Steinbrenner. As they walked through the zoo, the Yankees owner talked about how he was known as a sore loser.

“You show me someone who’s a good loser,” Lex remembered Steinbrenner saying, “and I’ll show you a loser.”

Lex smiled.

“Damn right,” he said. “I’m used to winning, and I don’t like not winning.”

Herman was gone now, but the true alpha of Lowry Park was still standing, mapping the zoo’s path into the future. He had survived every challenge and had outflanked the adversaries who demanded his removal. He had shrugged off their attacks, slipped through their nets. As usual, he made no apologies. If anything, he was bursting with bravado.
Maddux Business Report
, a local magazine, was interviewing him about Lowry Park’s runaway success under his leadership. He posed for the cover—the picture showed him in his safari hat, next to a giraffe—and boasted again about how the zoo relied on almost no tax dollars. Zoo execs who weren’t financially prudent, he said, never lasted. Part of his excitement stemmed from the fact that he was planning a new venture, something even more audacious that promised to make him more controversial than ever. A year and a half before, he had joined forces with another partner, a local veterinarian, and purchased 258 acres outside Lakeland, just north of the I-4 corridor in the center of Florida. Now he was quietly building a massive game park called Safari Wild.

One Friday morning that December, when the project was still a closely guarded secret, unknown even to most of Lowry Park’s board of directors, Lex invited a
St. Petersburg Times
reporter—the author of this book—to the park for a sneak preview of his latest work in progress. Accompanied by his wife, Elena, and by Larry Killmar, Lex steered a Land Rover through sprawling fields of thick green Bahia grass, where waterbucks and kudus and wildebeests already roamed. An Indian rhino twitched his ears beside a mud wallow. Watusi cattle, crowned with great curving horns, clopped heavily toward the vehicle, their throat flaps swaying in time with their steps, their tails flicking in the sun.

If all went as planned, Safari Wild would open the following year and would offer tours to small groups of visitors, no more than five hundred a day. Lex wasn’t sure yet what mode of transport would carry them on these safaris—maybe something solar-powered—but the guests would get close to the animals and be able to admire them in the open.

“It’s a little edgy,” he said.

From the backseat, Elena listened closely, petting a Welsh terrier named Pippi who sat in her lap and panted happily, pink tongue lolling.

As Lex laid out his plans, Elena frowned and leaned forward and said this conversation needed to remain off the record, at least for now. Lex glanced back at Elena and shot her a look. For a split second, his face went dead, and time seemed to stop inside the vehicle. Then he softened. Calmly, with only a hint of impatience, he told his wife that the interview was very much on the record and that he was excited about Safari Wild and wanted the public to know what he was doing. Elena crumpled into her seat and gazed into the distance. Larry held still and acted as though he hadn’t heard a word. Pippi looked back and forth at the humans, reading us with her shiny brown eyes.

Pushing onward, Lex explained that eventually the park would be stocked with close to a thousand animals, representing dozens of exotic or endangered species. He wanted to bring in giraffes and ring-tailed lemurs and even cheetahs, a species that he pointed out had once roamed this land. The fossil record, he said, showed that cheetahs had first evolved in North America before they migrated to Asia and Africa.

“Their main prey was the prong-horned antelope. That’s why the prong-horned antelope runs as fast as it does.”

He was talking more quickly now, growing more animated as he spun down the list of all the creatures he was gathering from other institutions and other countries. Sable antelopes and scimitar-horned oryxes. Sandhill cranes, black-and-white ruffed lemurs. An aviary populated by oscillated turkeys, wooly-necked storks, and crested screamers. As he reeled off the species, his face glowed with a mixture of both childlike wonder and ravenous lust. He wanted primates from Asia. Some orangs, maybe a few gibbons. Just that morning, he said, the park had received a shipment of Barbary sheep, a species originally from the mountains of northern Africa. He was raiding his own collection at the ranch, bringing in fifty axis deer, astonishingly beautiful animals, with a blizzard of spots blowing through their fur. Even though they were native to Sri Lanka, the bucks had antlers that looked like something invented by the Brothers Grimm.

Lex was cutting a deal with Lowry Park to bring three white rhinos to Safari Wild. The zoo was rapidly outgrowing its current space, he said. It needed an off-site facility where surplus animals could be housed, and he was ready to help by boarding the rhinos and other animals. Safari Wild was already looking after the bison that had been displaced by Gator Falls. At the moment, he was finalizing plans to fly in some patas monkeys, an African species famed for their speed and shyness. His workers were constructing an island for the monkeys and a wide moat to hold them. The key, he said, was in picking the right species. You needed a discerning eye to build a strong collection. A willingness to make choices.

“We’re not averse to taking risks,” said Larry, chiming in from the backseat.

Despite all the turmoil that had surrounded the importation from Swaziland, Lex longed to acquire a few more elephants. He didn’t know where they would come from, or how he’d hack his way through all the red tape to get the permits. He just knew he wanted them, and what he wanted, he usually got.

“I’d
love
to have elephants here,” he said, as though it were the easiest thing in the world.

He was showing his range now, deploying all his weapons. Just a few moments ago, he had offered a glimpse of his steely side, silencing his wife with a flash of his eyes. Now he had become Noah incarnate, open-hearted guardian of the world’s wonders. His confidence filled the Land Rover with light.