TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082189/08218900.066

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.7 KB | 149 lines

                                                                                LIVING, Page 50

The New Zoo: A Modern Ark


From Atlanta to Tacoma, today's menagerie is both a cageless
wonderland and a rescue station

By Nancy Gibbs


    Call it a natural disaster. The San Diego Zoo spent $3.5
million to build a designer forest that would house five
adolescent Malayan sun bears. The zookeepers planted some trees,
dug a moat, launched a waterfall, even hooked up a fiber-glass
tree with an electric honey dispenser. As company for their
wards, they invited lion-tailed macaques, yellow-breasted
laughing thrushes, orange-bellied fruit doves and Indian pigmy
geese.

    When the lush exhibit opened this summer, zoogoers loved
it. So did the bears. They shredded the trees, rolled up the
sod, plugged the moat -- and then one attempted a fast break
over the wall. Spectators went scrambling for a zookeeper, who
propped up a plywood barrier while another clanged some pots and
pans to intimidate the beasts and herd them into a locked
enclosure.

    Meanwhile, at Washington's National Zoo another experiment
was under way: scientists wanted to acquaint their rare golden
lion tamarins with a facsimile of their natural habitat, a
lowland Brazilian forest. But the coddled, zoo-happy monkeys
lacked some basic skills -- how, for instance, to peel a banana.
Instead, they fell out of the trees and got lost in the woods.

    At some 150 American zoos in between, the troubles are not
very different. The sharks eat the angelfish. The Australian
hairy-nosed wombat stays in its cave, and the South American
smoky jungle frog hunkers down beneath a leaf, all tantalizingly
hidden from the prying eyes of the roughly 110 million Americans
who go to zoos every year. Visitors often complain that as a
result of all the elaborate landscaping, they cannot find the
animals. But this, like almost everything else that goes wrong
these days, is a signal that America's zoos are doing something
very right.

    Just about every aspect of America's zoos has dramatically
changed -- and improved -- from what viewers saw a generation
ago. Gone are the sour cages full of frantic cats and the
concrete tubs of thawing penguins. Instead the terrain is
uncannily authentic, and animals are free to behave like, well,
animals, not inmates. Here is a Himalayan highland full of red
pandas, there a subtropical jungle where it rains indoors,
eleven times a day. The effect is of an entire globe
miraculously concentrated, the wild kingdom contained in
downtown Chicago or the North Bronx. As American zoos are
renovated and redesigned -- at a cost of more than a billion
dollars since 1980 -- hosts of once jaded visitors, some even
without children, are flooding through the gates. "In the past
15 years," says Cincinnati zoo director Edward Maruska, "we've
probably changed more than we've changed in the past hundred."

    And all to what end? To entertain, of course, but to do
more than that. By junking the cages and building vast
biological gardens, the zoos provide a decent, delightful place
for animals and people to meet and, with luck, fall in love.
Once that bond is made, the visitors discover there is a larger
mission at hand, a crusade to join. Between the birth of Christ
and the Pilgrims' landing, perhaps several species a year became
extinct. By the 1990s the extinction rate may reach several
species an hour, around the clock. American zoos are leading the
battle to stop that clock and recruit others to the
preservationist's cause. "We don't just want you to come here,"
says David Anderson of the New Orleans Audubon Park. "We're
trying to say, `Do something!'"

    The zoos have therefore taken on a role as educators that
dwarfs that of any other "recreational" institution. Whole
public school systems are redesigning their science curriculums
to take advantage of local exhibits, for what better biology
classroom could there be than a swamp or a rain forest? The
newest facilities, such as the Living World in St. Louis,
include state-of-the-art computer technology that turns a simple
menagerie into a cross between a laboratory and a video arcade.

    Though highly effective at raising consciousness and making
converts, this is not an easy or a cheap way to run a zoo. At
the Tiger River exhibit in San Diego, that lovely gushing
waterfall is part of a 72,000-gal. computerized irrigation
system. A huge banyan tree has heating coils in its roots to
encourage the python to uncoil near the viewing glass. Not far
away, an agile cliff-springer mountain goat is contained on the
assumption that it will not jump eight feet to a ledge on the
moat's far side that is constructed at a precise 30 degrees
angle. "But," admits architect David Rice, "nobody has told the
cliff springer that."

    Beyond the aesthetic and mechanical challenges, there is
the basic issue of what zoogoers should be allowed to see in a
naturalistic setting. Zoo directors refer to "the Bambi
syndrome," a belief common among visitors that all creatures
should be cuddly, or at least not killers. A while back, the
Detroit Zoo staff euthanatized a dying goat from the children's
zoo and placed it in the African-swamp exhibit, which includes
big vultures. Doing what came naturally, the vultures ate the
goat. About half the zoogoers who happened upon the scene were
fascinated, says director Steve Graham. But the other half
averted their children's eyes and scurried away.

    For all the increased drama in the exhibits themselves, the
real revolution is going on behind the scenes and out in the
wild, where a state of emergency exists. To begin with, most
zoos no longer take animals from the jungle; they grow their
own. About 90% of the mammals and 75% of the birds now in U.S.
zoos were bred in captivity, and some are even being carefully
reintroduced to their native environs. At the same time,
zoo-affiliated organizations like Wildlife Conservation
International are working to save whole habitats in 38 countries
in Africa, Asia and South America and to reduce the threats to
endangered species. Says the Bronx Zoo's visionary director
William Conway: "Our objectives are very clear -- to save
fragments of nature, to preserve biodiversity."

    As zoos fight back, they are pulling along the public with
some shrewd tactics. Conservationists often select an
irresistible, oversize crowd pleaser -- pandas are perfect, but
snow leopards and black rhinos work fine -- and lead a campaign
to preserve the creature's habitat. "There is a utility in the
concern for the giant panda," says the National Zoo's director
Michael Robinson. "Pandas are relatively stupid and
uninteresting animals. But they happen to be photogenic and
appealing, and they help focus people's attention." Big animals
need big swatches of habitat, and so in the process a lot of
less sexy species are protected too. To save the African
elephant requires saving the Serengeti. That means roughly 5,000
sq. mi. and, as it happens, 400 species of birds, maybe 50
species of mammals and tens of thousands of invertebrates. And
the elephants.

    Though many of these outlying efforts have been wildly
successful, the zoos themselves are still the front line. A
child who rubs noses, even through the plate glass, with a polar
bear or a penguin may be far more likely to mature into an
eager conservationist than into one who sees animals as toys or
accessories. It is hard to walk around a good zoo without
caring, deeply, about whether this miraculous wealth of lovely,
peculiar, creepy, unfathomable creatures survives or perishes.
And it will be a great sorrow if zoos are ever the last place
on earth where the wild things are.