When completed, the African Scenes exhibit will cover an area larger than the entire Lincoln Park zoo. In other times that might have been a mortifying prospect for officials at the city zoo.
George Rabb and Lester Fisher, however, have the identical response to such a suggestion: ”We are not in competition with each other.”
Refreshingly, they seem absolutely sincere and have a track record to prove it. Both zoos have invested roughly the same amount of money in building new exhibits in the last 15 years. But rather than looking jealously over each other`s shoulders, the two staffs have collaborated, sharing ideas and expertise.
The relative compactness of Lincoln Park in many ways perfectly complements the sprawl of Brookfield. If Brookfield offers a peek at the intimate interactions of species mixed together, Lincoln Park offers intimacy between people and animals.
Both zoos, for example, will be renovating their aging lion houses about the same time, featuring far more naturalistic indoor habitats.
Characteristically, however, Brookfield`s will be unbarred, separating animals from people with distance. Viewers on the elevated galleries will gain a longer view of the animals. Lincoln Park`s will place people and animals on the same eyeball level. The public will be allowed to come as close as is safely possible to the animals, which will be behind new, thin, stainless steel piano-wire bars to minimize viewing obstruction.
The success of the Great Ape House, as an enormously popular exhibit and as a proven facility for breeding a rare species, has had an impact on how Lincoln Park has developed since 1976. Most of its new exhibits constructed since then have some element of the ape house in them.
The underwater viewing windows into the polar bear pool have become as popular as the windows into the ape habitats. Children thrill to measure their hands to the outstretched paws of the swimming bears.
The geometrically stark Large Mammal House, lacking any naturalistic adornments, still is pleasing to the elephants, hippos, rhinos, giraffes and tapir who live there. It provides them with lots of bright, airy space in the public areas and equally spacious off-viewing areas used for breeding and for refuges separating mothers and babies from other adult animals. Oddly, the starkness works well for the public, too, as the exhibited animals stand in striking relief against the barren white walls, almost as if they are living sculptures.
Even the Penguin/Seabird House, the zoo`s most elaborate attempt to date to replicate the natural habitat of exhibited animals, has incorporated some of the ape-house concept. On the penguin side, the birds live on a shelf of artificial Antarctic ice that hangs into a frigid pool. On the seabird side, the birds live on an artificial Icelandic coastal cliff that is splashed by artificial waves.
On both sides, the viewers are separated from the birds only by glass, both above and below the water line. That means the penguins paddle and dive and the Greenland puffins perform their magnificent underwater flights just inches from the viewer`s eye.
Plans for new exhibits at Lincoln Park will continue the tradition of intimate contact with the animals. When it renovates its old primate house, though, home to its collection of monkeys and smaller primates, it will copy Tropic World in a couple of respects. Most of the interior space, now wasted on an open gallery for people, will be given over, as with Tropic World, to living space for the animals. And the animal habitats will incorporate as much natural and simulated material as possible to give viewers a feeling of the animals` natural environments. The species will not be mixed, however, and will be enclosed with glass walls to give the viewers the same nose-to-nose contact with the monkeys as they get at Lincoln Park`s ape house.
The zoo`s bird house will also invest heavily in re-creating a feeling for wilderness habitats. Plans call for ripping out all the building`s shallow cages and placing birds into free-flight spaces. Mixed species from various parts of the world will have appropriately landscaped and planted areas recalling their natural homes, including a river bank, marsh, prairie, rain forest and desert. A series of ramps, walkways and bridges will allow the public to stroll among the birds.
Outside the bird house, an enclosed birds-of-prey exhibit is planned that will tower over the rest of the zoo. It will contain separate enclosures for four different species, probably eagles, owls and vultures, and most certainly Lincoln Park`s Andean condors. The condors, critically endangered in the wild but being bred with great success at the zoo, will be in the largest habitat, rising 45 feet high and extending 90 feet deep. A rocky cliff at the rear of the exhibit will house off-viewing breeding dens for the birds.
”Sometimes,” says Chuck Harris, the zoo`s planning coordinator, ”you can work intensely to create an exhibit and once it`s completed wonder if you haven`t slightly missed the boat.”
Harris worked closely with keepers, architects and engineers to bring together the $1.25 million penguin/seabird exhibit. For that kind of money it seems rather small. But the bird habitats and viewing gallery take up only a third of the building`s space. Behind the scenes it is jammed with large pumps, compressors and cooling equipment that purify and refrigerate the habitats` air and water supplies.
”If I were to do it differently now that it`s in place,” Harris says,
”I think I`d show all that equipment that is behind the scenes to the public somehow. Some people might think it`s crazy to go to that effort to keep a few birds in captivity. I think it`s wonderful.
”These birds came from places in the world more remote and pristine than maybe any other of the animals at the zoo. Even so, the pollution, overfishing and other manmade problems are beginning to reach even their remote habitats, and it is threatening their survival. Maybe showing the immense amount of technology that goes into keeping them alive here would deepen the public`s respect for them and for their fragility.”
Such sentiment apparently is contagious in the zoo world. That was evident late last spring when Brookfield moved its five dolphins from its antiquated Seven Seas exhibit across the park to the new one. The move was planned and orchestrated by the exhibit`s curator, Ed Krajniak. Krajniak started at the zoo in 1959 as an 8th-grader clerking at a souvenir stand. When the original Seven Seas exhibit opened in 1961, he was promoted to selling admission tickets to the facility, and he has been there ever since.
For the last two years he has spent 14-hour days 7 days a week supervising the construction of his new, $12 million facility. A computer-driven operation, just the back-shop facilities alone are immense, filling a building that would make a respectable, medium-sized industrial plant. It includes emergency power generators, water salinizing, chlorinating and purifying equipment and machinery to recycle a million gallons of water every hour.
”When I got out of college and began working full-time at the zoo,”
Krajniak says, ”a lot of people thought I was nuts. Most people thought of zookeepers as nothing much more than shovelers. But I`ve been with Seven Seas since it started 27 years ago, and I`ve seen how attitudes change.
”Twenty-seven years ago the fish we bought to feed the dolphins were cheap and plentiful. Now the coasts are so polluted that factory ships have to move 300 miles out to sea to find unpolluted water. The little guys in the business, the family fishermen with a single little boat, have been forced out. In the Gulf of Mexico the dolphins are dying of liver disease, possibly from PCBs.
”Now it seems like people in general are beginning to realize that we`re all in this together and that we should pull together to solve some of these problems. If you didn`t have zoos and aquariums, most people wouldn`t be aware of the plight of animals in the wild. People have sort of realized what sort of resource they`ve got in the zoo, that just about everything known about dolphins and whales is known from captive specimens.”
Because the new exhibit is his baby, Krajniak has worried through everything from repeated leaks in the main, 800,000-gallon dolphin pool to how he is going to get the beloved but 3,000-pound Olga the walrus to her new quarters.
To that end, last year Krajniak placed a large dumpster trailer at the rear of Olga`s old habitat. He put his staff to work filing and sanding down all sharp edges in the dumpster, and painting it with an appropriately feminine shade of boudoir blue. They have encouraged Olga every day for more than a year to waddle into it and snooze a bit. That considerable effort is all being done to acclimate her to the contraption so she won`t be traumatized the day she is moved this autumn. Olga, after all, at 26 is the oldest walrus in captivity and possibly the animal children most adore at the zoo.
”She`s only going to take a 10-minute trip,” Krajniak says, ”but it`s an important 10 minutes.”
As for the leaks in the dolphin pool, the last ones were plugged in May to allow the move of the animals. It was a well-rehearsed operation, one in which Krajniak enlisted dozens of keepers from elsewhere in the zoo to assist him.
To make the move, Krajniak lowered the water level in the old dolphin pool and segregated the animals to the shallow ends. Ten of the strongest swimmers at the zoo climbed in with them to capture them one by one, placing them on special stretchers for their 10-minute truck ride to the new facility. As performers who have delighted 10 million zoo visitors, the dolphins seem docile, lovable and close to human in temperament. But when cornered, the dolphins revealed their true nature, the nature of all zoo animals. Whether caught in the wilderness or zoo-born, they are, no matter what species, all wild. As wild animals, their contact with the human species is unnatural, unpredictable and can be dangerous.
Used to humans in acceptable, predictable training and performing routines, the dolphins were not ready to be wrestled out of their pool. They lunged desperately to escape the grasping human hands and lashed out furiously and repeatedly to break the embrace of their keepers. It took a full 45 minutes to get the first dolphin out of the water and onto its stretcher, with one keeper being sent to the hospital in the process with an injured hand after being flung violently into the wall of the pool.
When all five dolphins were safely in the new facility, everybody, animals and humans alike, seemed slightly traumatized. The dolphins bunched together tightly, almost fearfully, as they explored their gorgeous new world, five times the size of their old one.
There had been real fear in the eyes of the keepers during the capture struggle at the old dolphin building. At the new building, the fear was replaced with tears. There was an almost tangible sense at that moment that the tears were bittersweet, produced by powerfully mixed emotions within the people who love and respect the dolphins the most–their keepers.
There was the knowledge that the animals were in the finest captive facility technology can provide, right down to a medical pool that eliminates forever the trauma of the capture process. But there was also the knowledge that no matter how large the new facility, it is a finite, artificial world. And there was the knowledge that it is this limited world in which the five dolphins now will remain until they die, captive servants of mankind.
Had he been in town, surely Lincoln Park`s Fisher would have come to Brookfield to lend moral support to George Rabb and his staff during such an auspicious occasion. As it was, however, Fisher was in East Africa leading a group of Chicagoans on a lecture tour of game reserves, thumping the tubs to save the remaining populations of animals still living wild and free by saving their wild homes.
Almost certainly he delivered his zookeeper`s sermon to somebody that day, as he does almost every day wherever he is:
”We`re not in any way kidding ourselves that we are replacing the wild. But as the wild vanishes, zoos and national parks are the only alternative these animals have for long-term living arrangements. For many creatures, the zoo is their last chance as a species to remain on Earth. For humans, that is a big responsibility and a debt that we owe to our own future generations.”
