TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/082189/08218900.066

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 8KB | 133 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.