On the other hand, Parker says the Brookfield baboons, all of whom were zoo-born and reared far from Africa, have shown amazing displays of complicated behavior similar to wild baboons. For instance, when Brookfield obtained a pack of wild African dogs some months ago, keepers temporarily put them on exhibit in cages within easy sight of the baboons.
The dogs` appearance instantly alarmed the baboons, though the two species, natural enemies in the wild, are safely separated by moats, walls and bars. Baboon mothers and young retreated to the top of the hill in their enclosure, while the young baboon males arrayed themselves in a defensive frontline ready to do battle in classic wild-baboon fashion.
The question of whether zoo-bred animals could hunt for and protect themselves if suddenly placed in their wild habitats is no longer academic. As wilderness habitats for many animals disappear, some species now live exclusively in zoos. For example, Bactrian camels of Mongolia cannot be found in the wild, only in zoos. Same for the onager, a Middle-Eastern burro. Closer to home, the last wild California condor was captured earlier this year, leaving the last 27 members of the species in California zoos, where intensive breeding efforts are underway.
Gorillas, Siberian tigers, snow leopards, Asian lions, sand cats and a host of other species may soon be exclusively zoo animals, too.
Though it is sometimes necessary to remove critically endangered species from the wild, it is the dream of most zoo people to see them placed back into the wild, a phenomenon that is already taking place. Pere David`s deer from China, the nene goose from Hawaii and the European bison from Poland were for a time found only in zoos. Once their numbers were safely bred upward in captivity, they were placed cautiously but successfully back into nature.
At Brookfield the public can see two different colonies of golden lion tamarins, a species of South American marmoset monkeys. Only a few of the species survive in the wild, in extremely small pockets of Brazilian rain forests. They are bred successfully at Brookfield, with one of the tamarin groups displayed in the Small Mammal House, the other in the South America section of Tropic World. What the public cannot see is a third colony sequestered in an attic area of Tropic World.
The sequestered colony lives in an environment that, to humans, is surreal. Only a few keepers are allowed into its holding area. Before keepers enter, they disinfect their shoes and don surgical masks and gloves to prevent transferring human primate diseases to the animals. The sequestered animals are being bred and raised for only one purpose–to reintroduce them into the wild. It is a part of a program being conducted with other zoos, and one of Brookfield`s specimens recently made the trip to Brazil to join a wild colony. ”It has been going on for the last 10 years,” says Dr. Anne Baker, Brookfield`s assistant curator for primates. ”They (the tamarins) are so isolated in such small pockets in the wild that no one colony can maintain enough genetic diversity to remain a healthy species. By introducing zoo specimens to the isolated wild colonies, we are hoping to enhance their genetic variability.”
Similar extraordinary efforts are being made to protect the wilderness homes of endangered species. Pam Parker spends part of her time in the Australian Outback at an abandoned sheep ranch purchased by Brookfield some years ago. Primarily she is interested in preserving from extinction the hairy-nosed wombat, an endangered, bearlike marsupial.
The wombats became endangered when humans settled their semi-arid wilderness in southern Australia to build sheep ranches. The humans introduced plants foreign to Australia, reaching a point where only about half the flora in the wombat`s habitat is native Australian. With the inundation of grazing sheep and a new, invading alien species that followed humans
–rabbits–the wombat`s normal food supply was severely disrupted.
”We have taken our abandoned ranch and excluded it from sheep grazing,” Parker says. ”We are beginning to see native plants taking back over, as they are much better suited to the terrain. By doing this, we are hoping to restore some balance so that the wombats can come back in some numbers.”
Brookfield scientists, too, are trying to find alternative food supplies for an animal that has become an Australian national symbol, albeit one whose numbers are rapidly diminishing–the koala bear. Koalas feed almost exclusively on native Australian eucalyptus tree leaves; because of that, most zoos can`t get adequate food for koalas, so they haven`t tried to keep and breed them. Australian eucalyptus forests that shelter wild koalas are also disappearing because of development. Should the trees disappear or dwindle drastically, the koala bear will become extinct. But a successful artificial diet attractive to koalas would ensure their survival in captivity at least.
”There really aren`t any other institutions to deal with this sort of thing,” says Parker. ”Art museums conserve art; history museums conserve history. Zoos are the analogous institutions charged with the stewardship of biological resources.”
If zoos are indeed moving from their role as sideshow entertainment into the main arena of biologic conservation, it is an expensive proposition.
Because Lincoln Park is part of the Chicago Park District and must draw its operating budget from district tax funds, modernizing and rebuilding the zoo seemed an unattainable project. Fisher took over at a time when the city`s tax base was declining and when the park district itself was hard-pressed to overcome deterioration throughout its system. As a result Fisher could not demand the lion`s share, so to speak, of the district`s budget to finance zoo improvements.
However, he could and did fall back on a not-for-profit organization started by 300 zoo lovers in 1959, the Lincoln Park Zoological Society. The society was founded expressly to raise money for the zoo and augment its programming in partnership with the district.
That Lincoln Park has never charged admission undoubtedly accounts for much of its popularity. It is demonstrably one of the last common areas in the city that is of universal appeal, used and enjoyed by all strata of citizenry.
The zoological society seemed to have sensed a wellspring of goodwill within the community for the zoo, and when it began fundraising, it did so with startling results. Philanthropic donors, both corporate and individual, have eagerly opened their checkbooks for successive zoo fund-raising drives since the society was founded.
A society drive to raise $25 million to build new exhibits between 1976 and 1982 met its goal. Now boasting 13,000 active members, the society is completing a drive in which it set out to raise $5.5 million, to be matched by $4.5 million in park district funds, to renovate its oldest buildings. Instead of raising just $5.5 million, the current drive has brought in more than $11 million.
The $25 million drive gave Lincoln Park a new animal hospital; Great Ape House; the waterfowl pond and flamingo dome; an outdoor amphitheater classroom; the hoofed-animal building (zebras, buffalo, antelope, camels);
Large Mammal House (giraffes, elephants, hippos, rhinos, tapir); Penguin/
Seabird House; and administration building.
The current drive will be used to reconstruct the children`s zoo, scheduled to open this autumn, and the primate, lion and bird houses.
The park district gives the zoo about $2.5 million a year for operating expenses covering keepers` salaries, animal food and medical expenses, and general housekeeping. This is augmented by $3.2 million in society funds annually that support an ambitious education department serving 100,000 children and adults every year, plus the zoo`s graphics department, its extensive library and archives and a large zoo volunteer staff.
Fisher says the changes he has overseen at Lincoln Park could not have come about without widespread public support and donations.
”I feel a very strong moral responsibility to these animals,” he says.
”If we are going to keep them, we have to do right by them. Our old facilities just were not up to standards, and I think that was becoming apparent to an increasingly sophisticated public. The whole conservation ethic has contributed to this. The diminishing number of animals and habitats in nature has become well known, and I think most people empathize and have an understanding of this. Once our zoo started going to the community and to organizations to say we needed help, people responded immediately.”
Brookfield has an annual operating budget of $16.5 million, making it one of the wealthier zoos in the world. Although some of that comes out of forest preserve taxes, 60 percent comes from the zoo`s own revenue-producing resources. Though the zoo charges $2.25 for an adult admission, it is one of the lowest admissions of any major American zoo. It also brings in money from separate admissions to its Seven Seas show, Tropic World and children`s zoo, and from all concessions in the park, including parking, food and drink, safari ride, souvenirs and books.
Because Brookfield is run autonomously through the Chicago Zoological Society, it is run more flexibly than most public zoos, allowing it to budget for projects that do not always seem to have direct benefits for the public. That is especially true when it comes to research activities, such as the Australian effort to save the hairy-nosed wombat. But even Brookfield has had to turn increasingly to philanthropic sources to finance large capital improvements.
It has just gone over the top of a $20 million fund-raising drive with a year to spare. Proceeds are financing the recently completed new Seven Seas exhibit, a total redesign of the lion house and creation of an African exhibit that eventually will cover nearly 25 percent of the park.
”Chicago cares very much about its cultural institutions,” says Penny Korhumel, outgoing chairman of the Chicago Zoological Society who presided over the $20 million drive. ”In many cases we were going to the same corporate donors as Lincoln Park, and rather than splitting their donations between the two of us, they heard us out and generally gave each of us what we asked for. A zoo is an investment in a place for people of all ages, and I think that appeals to donors. There are only a few things in life that are like that.”
Indeed, zoos annually outdraw all professional sports combined. With an estimated four million visitors to Lincoln Park and nearly two million visitors to Brookfield annually, Chicago probably has more interest in zoos than any other city.
Both Lincoln Park and Brookfield are deeply involved in bringing in organized school groups for educational programming, and both offer a number of adult education programs. But the bulk of zoo attendance will always be casual visitors looking for an hour or two of inexpensive diversion.
”Entertainment will always be one of the prime concerns for zoos,” says Sandy Friedman, Brookfield`s assistant director. ”Our attitude here and my strong personal belief, however, is that entertainment and education are not mutually exclusive ideas. If you tell people why animals behave in a certain way or get them to study the way an animal`s ears or feet look so that they can tell whether they are from a hot or cold climate, their visit is more enjoyable. Simply putting up signs near the cages isn`t the answer because most people don`t read them and those that do spend an average of only four seconds reading.”
The challenge of making zoos a painless form of casual education has resulted in a great deal of experimentation at both Lincoln Park and Brookfield. More than 20 years ago Lincoln Park originated the idea of zoo docents, volunteers who are trained in giving entertaining lectures on various exhibits to zoo visitors. The volunteers must undergo a rigorous 15-week training session and then are required to work at least 100 hours a year, donating 4 hours a week. They sometimes act as guides to organized zoo visits, but they also often simply stand at an exhibit to answer questions. The program proved so popular at Lincoln Park that it has since been successfully copied at many zoos, including Brookfield.
At one of Brookfield`s most elaborate exhibits, the predator ecology building that displays smaller breeds of wildcats, the zoo insists all visitors be accompanied by a trained lecturer. The zoo is beginning experiments with taped lectures on audio wands, such as those used in many art museums. It is also experimenting with hands-on, interactive educational devices. In its bird house the zoo is trying out mechanical wings and a walk- through form in which visitors flap their arms in the same patterns birds use in flight.
Perhaps the most effective and yet most unobtrusive educational tools, however, are the zoo habitats themselves. In 1975 Brookfield opened its predator ecology exhibit in the south end of the lion house to breed and display some of the rarest cat species in the world. It is one of the earliest examples in Chicago of what zoo designers call ”environmental immersion,” a display that shows not only the animal but also the animal`s natural environment.
The predator ecology exhibit is the fruition of many new technologies developed in the 1960s that have allowed zoos to abandon forever the traditional ”tiled-bathroom” cages. Strong plastic epoxies can be sculpted into realistic rocks, trees or virtually any natural form. They are colorfast, so they can take and hold pigmentations permanently, and, being extremely hard, no bacteria or parasites can live in them to endanger the animals in the exhibits.
The predator ecology exhibit resembles, behind the scenes, a permanent Hollywood soundstage set for an around-the-world adventure movie. It takes up 125,000 cubic feet, housing just 14 cats, none much bigger than the common house pet. But the animals–one fishing cat from Malaysia, three margays from Brazil, four Pallas cats from the Himalayas in Central Asia, three bobcats from the Rocky Mountains of North America and three sand cats from the deserts of North Africa, are extremely rare.
Because they are all night hunters, they are also extremely difficult to exhibit. For five hours a day when the cats are on public view, the building lights are dimmed to replicate a moment just after dusk when the animals are most animated and active in nature.
The sand-cat exhibit is housed under an aluminum, hemispherical dome 36 feet in diameter and 18 feet high, the largest indoor structure of its kind ever used for a zoological display. The floor, spread with sand and adorned with epoxy rocks and plants, is a reproduction of a rocky desert canyon. The viewer looks into the scene from a stony grotto opening, the dome giving the illusion of miles of open Sahara horizon and an infinite desert sky.
A visitor leaves the sand cat area and crosses what seems to be a rickety wooden bridge spanning a gorge that separates a Himalayan mountain scene from a Rocky Mountain scene. The epoxy rocks are made from molds of actual rock formations in nature. They accurately portray the horizontal fault lines of the Rockies, home to the bobcats, and the vertical fault lines of the Himalayas, home to the Pallas cats.
Moving down the trail, the visitor comes to a tangled South American rain forest made up of epoxy trees, palms, vines and shrubs. A viewer stands on a ledge nine feet above the exhibit floor, on a sightline with the lower branches of the towering trees. This is the habitat of the margay, a tree-dwelling cat, and viewer and cats are on the same level.
Across another bridge, the visitor suddenly enters a dank Asian rain forest filled with epoxy flora and home to the fishing cat. A waterfall at one end of the exhibit spills into an epoxy stream bed, and the stream fills three small pools along its course. The pools are stocked with small fish, and the viewers are treated to the spectacle of the cat`s fishing prowess.
The animals are moved in and out of the exhibit areas behind the scenes with a series of enclosed–ahem–catwalks leading to more traditional steel holding cages used for feeding, medical observation and off-display privacy.
”We`ve bred more sand cats and Pallas cats than anywhere else in the world,” says Bruce Brewer, Brookfield`s assistant mammal curator. A Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University with special interest in ecology and evolutionary biology, he is understandably proud.
”I work with some of the rarest animals in the world, a privileged position in which I can try to make an impact on their record as breeders in captivity. This entire facility is designed for the ultimate purpose of making the females of these few specimens comfortable enough to come into their natural estrus (breeding) cycle. They are so rare we simply don`t know enough about their lives in the wild or their diets and other factors that might affect their breeding. We`ve had some success with breeding margays, but nobody has ever bred a fishing cat in captivity.”
he impressive and expensive replication of the desert, mountain and rain-forest habitats may have some effect on their breeding, but perhaps not.
”The cats couldn`t care less whether they`re sitting in an exacting replica of a jungle tree or on a shelf in a regular cage,” Brewer says. ”As impressive as the exhibits are in here, they are for the people, not the animals. The main thing zoos are about today is conservation–conservation of species and conservation of the natural habitats from which they come. We can work toward conservation through research, but we must also work for it by educating the public.
”By having exhibits like these, instead of traditional zoo cages, we are hoping to give the public an understanding of the animal as a part of an environment.”
Though this was one of Brookfield`s earliest attempts at ”environmental immersion,” its success has spurred the zoo on to much larger exhibits using the same basic theory. Foremost among them is Tropic World, the largest indoor zoo exhibit anywhere.
The detailed planning that went into Tropic World, with carefully reproduced epoxy rain forest, complete with the canopy effect of trees at varying heights, allows the simultaneous exhibit of various, competing species in the same space. That is a revolutionary idea for zoos, and it may have some impact on the well-being of captive animals.
”Our South American exhibit contains five species of primates,” says Dr. Anne Baker, ”and they share their display with tapir, anteaters, sloths and three bird species. These are species that inhabit the rain forest in nature together and, like in nature, they interact in here. They naturally have to compete for the space they use in the exhibit, as they would in the wild, but it is healthy competition. I think we have less aggression within species groups than you would find in other zoos where they are displayed in separate exhibits.”
But, apart from the possible contributions to the mental well-being of the animals, the elaborate exhibit, again, is more for the benefit of the people who come to see them.
”People have to work harder here than at a traditional zoo exhibit to see the animals,” Baker says, ”but if they observe carefully, they come away with a far better understanding of how animals live in the wild. This really is a lot more like going to a forest to observe the animals. It doesn`t really duplicate a rain forest. But it at least approximates the natural environment, and we want people going away appreciating and perhaps respecting the environment as much as they might the animals.”
Most animals have to be taken off exhibit every day to allow keepers close access for medical observation and feeding purposes. All the animals except the birds in Tropic World, for example, go off the exhibit every evening to backstage holding areas. They are summoned by a whistle and lured with the knowledge that their main meal is awaiting them, and they stay the night to be re-released into the habitats the next morning. Such daily movement of animals, especially dangerous ones, requires that elaborate but smoothly functioning systems of transfer corridors be designed into the habitat.
”Our mixed-species exhibits are sometimes difficult to orchestrate in that it`s difficult to pick what animals can successfully live together in an artificial, confined space,” says Ray Robinson, Brookfield`s exhibits artist. ”But once it is achieved, it is a much richer experience for the public and the animals. The stimulation the animals receive when they must compete for their space every day is something to behold. Watching the monkeys and the young gorillas encounter each other in Tropic World is to me something almost priceless.
”I was fortunate to come into this business at a time when technology and new materials are coming out to help us create more and better illusions. The mixing of species such as in Tropic World is a departure from old-fashioned zoos, but, in spite of its elaborate appearance, the exhibit isn`t all that different from the traditional cages, just larger. It is primarily cement and epoxy, easy to wash down and clean out every night, not unlike the old `tiled-bathroom` cages.”
The new, enlarged Seven Seas exhibit that opened this summer gives the dolphins four pools with five times the volume of water that their old exhibit had. It is housed in a new building suitable for a fair-sized college field house, graced with artificial Caribbean shorelines and planted with real tropical palms and bushes.
Opening this fall behind the dolphin building is the new home for the zoo`s most popular animal, Olga the walrus, and its collection of seals and sea lions. Their new habitat, constructed to resemble a rocky shoreline in the Pacific Northwest, is seven times larger than their old one. The public areas are designed to inform the viewers about the animals` wild homes. The behind-the-scenes facilities, furnished with holding areas and pools, are designed to improve the health, welfare and breeding capabilities of the animals.
Later this year Brookfield will gut and refurbish its lion house. The current lion house uses 80 percent of its interior space for the public viewing gallery; this will be reversed with the new design. Visitors will use elevated walkways that will take up only 20 percent of the building`s interior, with the remainder used for the animals, including behind-the-scenes maternity dens.
After the lion house, Brookfield will take on one of its largest developments ever, creating an outdoor African Scenes exhibit. Taking up about 25 percent of the zoo`s total area, it will re-create scenes of most of Africa`s wild environments, including deserts, grasslands, forests and marshes. Stocking the new exhibit, scheduled to begin construction before 1990, will be no problem, as the zoo already has the animals scattered in exhibits around the park and needs only to bring them together.
African Scenes will be more like a safari park as a viewing experience than a traditional zoo visit. An artificial river will offer boat rides. As with an African river, passengers will see lions and rhinos roaming the banks. Giraffes, gazelles, impalas and zebras will have a savannah to roam and a waterhole at which to gather, complete with a camouflaged observation blind to give viewers a close-up look. Predators and prey, such as wild dogs and crowned cranes, will be present in the same viewer sight-lines but separated by artfully concealed moats. Off-viewing animal quarters also will be concealed; the giraffes, for example, to be housed in what will appear as a granite hill.
