It is an early Wednesday morning. Outside, people stroll. Outside, animals prowl. Lincoln Park Zoo is shaking its furry, feathered self to life.
“Look, Mommy, look,” says a little boy, as a lion yawns.
“Look, Mommy, look,” says a little girl, as a vulture spreads its wings.
Inside, in the inner reaches of the Robert R. McCormick Bear & Wolf Habitat, a 1,100-pound polar bear named Thor is lying on the floor. A few days short of his 20th birthday, he is getting his teeth cleaned and his heart checked, and he is undergoing a castration.
“How’s he doing?” asks Kevin Bell, the zoo’s director, who has arrived mid-surgery.
“How would you be doing?” asks Dr. Robyn Barbiers, her eyes focused on Thor as she tosses a bloody piece of gauze to the floor.
“Very funny,” says Bell.
“He’s doing great,” says Barbiers.
Barbiers is director of veterinary medicine at Lincoln Park Zoo. She has been at this 1,325-or-so-animal institution–the country’s oldest and most popular (well, it’s free!) zoo–for nearly four years. Before that she was the vet at Detroit’s zoo. And way before that, when still a college student wondering which scientific or medical career to pursue, she was told by a prominent zoo director: “A woman shouldn’t be a vet and shouldn’t work at a zoo. It’s too dangerous.”
She heard but didn’t heed, and now, at 41, is a member of a very exclusive club.
There are only about 200 wildlife veterinarians in North America and fewer than 100 employed at zoos, compared with some 15,000 domestic-animal vets.
Now Barbiers has a pack of honors, the respect of peers and colleagues, an international reputation and, at the moment, a piece of a polar bear in her hands.
“That was interesting,” says Barbiers.
She has never performed this sort of operation on a polar bear before; she is doing the surgery because Thor’s breeding days are over.
He has sired a number of children, and since there is no need or room for any new cubs, this operation will make it unnecessary to separate the bear from his mate during breeding season.
“Now we won’t have to split up Thor and Chukchi,” says Barbiers. “They can pal around all the time.”
In repose, anesthetic tubes sticking from his mouth, his tongue hanging limp, Thor looks almost meek. But there is menace too. Check out those paws! They look as big as bicycle tires.
“This is the most dangerous animal here,” says Bell.
Barbiers finishes suturing the relatively small incision necessary for the operation.
“You wouldn’t want him waking up now,” she says.
At the bear’s other end, keeper Diana Villafuerte holds a squeegee on the bear’s neck, “as if that would really do any good if he wanted to get up,” says Bell.
Barbiers rises from her knees. It’s a stiff and slow climb. “Ow, my legs,” she says.
The tubes are removed from Thor’s mouth. The squeegee comes off his neck. Assistant vet Dr. Ann Manharth begins to gather the surgical tools and the bloody remnants of surgery. Vet technicians Joel Pond and Eileen McKee start packing up their equipment.
“He’s not going to be happy when he gets up,” says Barbiers, making the long walk around the bear. She bends down and tickles one of his ears. He doesn’t budge.
“Good boy,” she says.
It is another Wednesday morning. Outside, people wander. Outside, animals roar. The zoo is alive with sounds.
Inside, deep inside the Lester E. Fisher Great Ape House, Barbiers brushes back her reddish blond hair and leans down to listen to the beating of an aged ape’s heart.
“That’s a good girl,” she says, in a voice barely above a whisper. “That’s a good girl.”
The “girl” is a gorilla named Mumbi and she is lying on a blanket on the floor of the kitchen of the ape house.
Anesthetized by means of a blowgun, Mumbi had been carried in a few minutes earlier by four keepers.
It was to have been a routine physical, but Barbiers has noticed a problem and is now using shears to shave a portion of the ape’s lower abdominal area to better examine what may be a bite, a sore or an infection.
The mood in this makeshift operating room is one of professional calm, until, “She moved,” says Pond.
The room goes silent. Everyone stops moving, because a moving gorilla is not a good thing.
“I don’t know if we’ll have to run for it or not,” says Barbiers.
She gives the animal another anesthetic injection and then adjusts a light to better see the nasty-looking infection.
This is an amazing thing to watch.
Most of us encounter zoo animals at their healthiest and best, playful and preening. But here with Mumbi–and so often in the life of Barbiers–one gets an emotionally crushing understanding of the vulnerability of all animals, even those as seemingly strong and invincible as a 200-pound gorilla.
Unable to communicate to humans in conventional ways, animals suffer in silence, their pain mute. Symptoms of any illness are delivered like some ancient code that must be deciphered in order to tend–to cure.
“That’s one of the most difficult things, the greatest challenge,” Barbiers would later say. “You have to learn to read the signs. Zoo animals instinctively hide their illnesses, because in the wild, signs of weakness mark them as easy prey. These animals are good at hiding illness, because a sick animal is usually going to wind up being somebody’s dinner.”
Mumbi is sick. She is 36 years old, very old for a lowland gorilla and she has been beset for the last few months with kidney problems. She is one of the zoo’s most prized and beloved animals: In 1970 she gave birth to Kumba, the first gorilla born at the zoo and one of the building blocks of what would become the most renowned gorilla collection at any zoo in the world.
The gorillas are especially dear to Barbiers. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they are 98.3 percent genetically identical to humans. In any case, Barbiers often sits in the Great Ape House in the early mornings after she gets to the zoo.
“It is such a peaceful place,” she says. “(The gorillas) all have such individual and distinct personalities and are so civilized in the ways they behave. Being there makes me feel good, to talk to them and touch them. It all feels very natural.”
Mumbi has stopped moving and Barbiers and her staff quickly finish their work. The longer an animal has to be under anesthesia, the more problematic any procedure becomes.
“Good girl,” says Barbiers, cleaning Mumbi’s infection and dusting it with baby powder.
Soon the keepers carry Mumbi to a small enclosure, where she is gently laid, still quite unconscious, on a bed of straw.
Barbiers enters this space and climbs over the ape, breaking one of her own rules: “Never put a gorilla between yourself and the door.”
And be careful of orangutans, too.
Shake hands with Barbiers and you will notice a stiffness in her grip. She can’t fully bend the fingers of her right hand, which is blemished with small scars, the remnants of a far-too-close encounter many years ago.
She was filling in for a vacationing vet at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. She was examining some lesions on the foot of an orangutan when the ape’s cage mate suddenly grabbed her arm, pulled her hand into its mouth and clamped its teeth.
“I was sure I was going to lose my arm,” Barbiers says. “I was just frozen and all I kept thinking was, `What kind of job can I get with one arm?’ “
A keeper came to the rescue.
Now, her face increasingly shadowed with concern, because Mumbi is not coming out of the anesthetic as quickly as she would like, Barbiers is tapping gently on Mumbi’s chest–whispering “Good girl; c’mon, sweetie.”
Eric Meyers, a keeper for a dozen years in the ape house, says, “Dr. Robyn could be a drummer,” but it lightens the mood not at all.
“C’mon, sweetie,” says Barbiers. C’mon, sweetie, wake up.”
The doctor remains in the enclosure until her patient regains consciousness.
Barbiers isn’t home very often. When she is, she cuddles up with two cats, Stockton and Rover, or with books, some with unusual titles such as “Teach Yourself Swahili” and “Current Technologies in Small Mammal Surgery.” She rarely has people over.
“I am not just private,” she says. “I’m very shy.”
On the living room table are books about South Africa. That’s where she plans to travel next.
All around the neatly kept Northwest Side bungalow are things she has brought back from previous travels: coasters from Brazil, where she was invited to give a lecture; photos from Tanzania; a bowl from Costa Rica; a statue from Belize; a blowgun and wooden darts from Malaysia.
The cats, seeing a stranger with Barbiers, scurry into the bedroom.
“They aren’t used to people,” she says.
On the small bookshelf next to the bed are standard page-turners, by Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Robin Cook–and a thick book written by her great, great grandfather, who was a Confederate naval commander in the Civil War.
Barbiers is a Northerner, born in Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1956, the youngest of three daughters of Art and Judy Barbiers. Art was a microbiologist. Judy taught high school English and typing.
“I think my dad always wanted a boy,” says Barbiers. “That’s why he umpired Little League games. He eventually got to umpire in the Little League World Series.”
But he did not neglect his daughters, often taking them on weekend excursions to Chicago, where they would visit the city’s museums.
“It got to the point where my sisters (Linda, a social worker, and Jill, a former ad executive) considered themselves too old for the museums and wanted to go shopping, so they’d go off with my mom, and my dad and I would go to the zoo,” Barbiers says.
They would stroll around Lincoln Park Zoo, and though she was even then “fascinated by the apes,” it would be many years before she thought of making a career at zoos.
Few women did.
It wasn’t until 1972 that Lincoln Park Zoo had a woman zoo keeper on its staff. And in the mid-1970s only 6.5 percent of veterinary students were women.
Robyn Barbiers got hooked on veterinary medicine while at Hope College in Holland, Mich., where she was majoring in chemistry and working in the school’s primate lab. During her second year, she came to Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights. As part of this student exchange program, she went to work at a South Side animal hospital.
That was it.
She applied to Michigan State University, where she would spend more than five years becoming a vet.
“I’m a total nerd,” she says. “I always have been. I enrolled in a summer chemistry program between junior and senior years of high school.”
There are animal pictures on the walls of her home office, most of them of exotic creatures. But the biggest picture is of the face of a handsome dog.
It’s the picture of a mixed breed, West African Ridgeback and German shepherd. Her name was Grublin, after famed gorilla researcher Jane Goodall’s son, Hugo, who was nicknamed “Grub.”
Barbiers got Grublin as an 8-week-old puppy, and the dog was with her through school, a four-year marriage and her first few jobs.
Two years ago, on the day she was moving from an apartment into the house in which she now lives, the 15-year-old dog suffered a stroke.
“I just sat in the corner with her, cradling her and crying as the movers brought all of my stuff in,” Barbiers recalls. “I cried all day. Then I called the zoo and had my euthanizing equipment brought to the house. I just couldn’t see Grublin suffer anymore but I couldn’t, hard as it was for me to do, let someone else put her down.
“She was such a great animal. She really didn’t like other dogs, but became a blood donor for dozens of them. Isn’t that a great irony? She saved a lot of lives.
“I gave her the shot myself and then some friends and I took her to a forest and we buried her. . . . “
Outside, people stare. Outside, animals stretch and snort.
Inside, in makeshift offices in what was once the zoo’s small mammal house, Barbiers sits at her desk reading about chronic renal failure.
“I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything more we can do, anything we can try for Mumbi,” she says.
Barbiers and her staff have been housed here since May, when the 20-year-old Kroc Animal Hospital closed for renovation.
Most visitors to the zoo never saw that hospital. It was not identifiable from the pathway that passed over it. Hidden from view, it could be reached only by means of a metal stairway.
In a way, that was in keeping with the general ambience of zoos: no unpleasantness for patrons.
Until the 1960s, zoos existed primarily as animal galleries for the popular entertainment of visitors.
Matters of education, conservation and research were largely ignored, in most cases due to lack of understanding.
Things began to change when it became evident that the supply of wild animals was not limitless; indeed, that there was a critical threat of extinction of many species.
In 1969, the United States passed the Endangered Species Act. Zoos realized that the only way to continue a source of supply was through cooperative efforts among them.
The need to maintain healthy animal populations and reproductive research became priorities. Greater emphasis was placed on animal behavior and ecology.
This increased desire to keep animals alive longer and keep them healthier longer through preventive medicine and nutrition greatly increased the responsibilities of and respect for zoo veterinarians.
“More importantly, it had to do with respect for the dignity of the animals,” says Barbiers, as she’s off to see a dozen or so.
It is a Friday morning and the vet is making her rounds. This is one of the more exciting and hands-on aspects of her job. Increasingly her days are consumed by meetings, telephone consultations and administrative chores.
There are almost daily emergencies, but it is preventive medicine that is the backbone of the zoo’s medical program.
It is not glamorous.
There are vaccinations. There are pregnancy tests. Dental checkups. Sterilizations. Routine shots. Checking for parasites.
First up is Indra, a 17-year-old camel with a bad leg. Barbiers thinks it’s just “a touch of arthritis,” and bends beside the massive beast for a closer look.
And on it goes–from a cow who is lethargic to a two-toed sloth who can’t open his eyes to a snake named Ratso who will need an operation to remove a tumor. At every stop, Barbiers consults with keepers.
“They are my eyes and ears,” she says. “They know these animals. They observe them far more than I could.
“They run to all extremes, from the keeper who will call about the slightest thing to those who might not worry until it’s almost too late. They are the ones who keep us informed and I always tell them to err on the side of being overly cautious.”
She has stopped in to see Mumbi and is pleased to find her active. Now the doctor is in the Regenstein Small Mammal-Reptile House, touching a Madagascar tree boa, a tiny snake that has, for lack of a more technical term, “a runny nose.” Barbiers takes out a flashlight to look. “Say, ahhhh,” she says.
At the McCormick Bird House, she checks out a scarlet ibis that has had a portion of a broken beak replaced with a plastic prosthesis.
“That’s looking good,” she says.
Barbiers made news earlier this year when one of the zoo’s flamingos severed its foot. The common course of action would have been to euthanize the animal. But in this case, she decided to fit the bird for an artificial leg.
After three weeks, the bird began refusing food. A week later, it was beyond hope or help and had to be put down. Barbiers took some heat for the experiment from animal rights activists and even from some keepers.
“Look, Robyn has to make hard decisions that others don’t agree with,” says Alan Varsik, mammal collection manager. “She can be viewed at times as the anti-Christ. But I will tell you she has the best rapport with keepers of any vet I have ever known or observed. She can be very opinionated, but she is never arrogant.
“When she’s being serious, she can appear tough. And I think she holds too many people up to her standards. Some just can’t devote the kind of time to work that she does.”
Though a few keepers have criticisms of their vet, most like her. There is an easy flow to conversations between the vet and the keepers. As if to underscore this informality, she is never referred to as Dr. Barbiers but always as Dr. Robyn.
“A lot of vets have know-it-all attitudes,” she says. “I try not to. Some keepers have said, `I can’t believe you say “I don’t know.” They’ve never heard that before. But if I don’t know something, I’ll admit it and then try to find out. I listen to the keepers. I can’t do my job without them.”
In the interior of the bird house, in a room filled with small cages, there is a small and delicate green bird–a broadbill, native to jungles. It is sharing a cage with its brother.
To the casual observer, the birds appear identical. But Barbiers is no casual observer, and she’s worried.
“Look at this one,” she says. “Its eyes are flatter, its color duller.”
Kathy Brown, an area supervisor, nods in sad agreement.
“There is definitely something wrong here, something wrong with him, but we don’t know what it is. He’s just not right,” says Barbiers.
“I hope it’s something you can fix,” says Brown.
This kind of hope provides the fuel for Barbiers’ professional passion.
“There are so many mysteries here,” Barbiers starts to say, walking away from the bird house. It’s no stroll. She has the pace of a race walker. “Animals that appear fine one day are often dead the next and, even after completing a post-mortem, we can’t determine why. It’s so frustrating.”
Dr. Robyn’s an expert on knowing when animals are pregnant,” says Kevin Bell, sarcastically.
“What did I ever do to you?” she asks.
“You promised me a baby rhino,” he says. “Remember?”
“Sure, but I never said when.”
They laugh; the respect and affection between them is palpable. But at the zoo, having babies is a serious business.
Not only is an animal’s birth a joyous occasion–life!–it can have all sorts of other benefits, ranging from conservation to research and even marketing.
In 1996, a baby orangutan was born in the ape house. As is often the case with these rambunctious beasts, the father, in his haste for some hanky-panky with the mother, knocked the baby off a 4-foot-high ledge. It landed on its head with a sickening thud.
The zoo lacked equipment sophisticated enough to test the infant and so made arrangements with a hospital to bring the baby in for a CAT scan.
This all had to be done surreptitiously. It would not do to have mothers with their human babies see an ape coming through the door.
And so Barbiers wrapped the tiny baby in the interior folds of her down jacket and rushed to the hospital’s emergency room.
“I’m Robyn Barbiers,” she told the attending nurse, who was not aware of the special circumstances.
“Yes,” said the nurse, beginning to fill out an admittance form. “I was told to expect you. Now just a little bit of information, please. You are the mother?”
“Yes,” said Barbiers.
“And how old is the baby?”
“Four hours,” said Barbiers.
The nurse stared up from the form.
“Four hours?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Wow,” said the nurse. “You really look good.”
The baby, found to be undamaged and later named Batang, is now swinging about at a zoo in Topeka, Kan.
Barbiers’ older sisters, both of whom are married, will often ask her, “Why don’t you go into private practice and make lots of money?”
Though she could, according to some private vets, probably triple her $50,000-or-so salary, she has never even toyed with the idea.
“I’m so easily bored,” she says. “In private practice, your relationships are less with the animals than with the clients. And I think I’d find the work very repetitious.”
She thinks from experience. After graduating in 1982 with a doctor of veterinary medicine degree from Michigan State, she couldn’t land a zoo job. So she went to work at an emergency clinic in Canton, Ohio, and then at another in Cincinnati, working from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. Patients were mostly cats and dogs.
When offered the job as third-ranking vet at Detroit Zoological Parks in Royal Oak, Mich., she pounced on it.
“How ecstatic was I?” she asks. “Let me put it this way: I took a $15,000 pay cut and moved into the city of Detroit.”
As a female zoo vet, she was among the pioneers in the field. Veterinary medicine until relatively recently was a very physically demanding job .
“It was really cowboy stuff,” she says. “Roping animals, hauling them down.”
The sophistication of zoo medicine parallels precisely the development of anesthetics and delivery systems that allowed the animals to be immobilized and have them wake up.
Barbiers was met with what she calls “casual resentment” in Detroit. But not so casual as to prevent some from dubbing Barbiers and Dr. Peri Wolff, then a vet at Lincoln Park, “The Wicked Bitches of the North.”
“That’s just professional resentment,” says Wolff, who left Chicago in 1989 and is now chief vet at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, set to open near Orlando, Fla., next spring. “If you were a woman and spoke up, you were characterized as bitchy. And Robyn and I were certainly forthright, and on leadership tracks.”
Barbiers would spend seven years in Detroit and become the zoo’s chief vet. She says: “I learned so much, most of it from head keeper Bill Pasanen. He knew a phenomenal amount about animals, and he was so willing to share knowledge. He was tough, but I felt I had made it when he stopped calling me `Kid’ and started calling me Doc.’ “
As a general practitioner, Barbiers deals with every imaginable disease, every system and every species.
The Species Survival Plan–a cooperative effort established by zoos in the 1980s to maintain healthy animal populations and research animals reproducing in captivity–named Barbiers its veterinarian adviser for the chimpanzee, maned wolf and pygmy hippo. Her other areas of specialty are giraffes, black rhinoceros and great apes.
It is a full life. She leaves her house for the zoo at 6 a.m. and often doesn’t return until 7 p.m. She works Saturdays. She has been dating the same man for a year, seeing him “when time allows.”
“She’s so dedicated,” says Wolff, who is divorced. “When we get together, we talk about guys, all the normal things, but mostly we’re trying to figure out how to get balance in our lives. We can’t work our lives away.”
Things will get even busier next July when Barbiers and her staff move into a new home: the Searle Animal Hospital, the former hospital expanded and renovated. And as zoos continue to change, vets will be called upon to play larger roles in matters other than medical.
“What we are trying to be is a commercial for the environment,” says Alan Varsik. “We want a visit to the zoo to have some influence in the way you live your life. It should make you care more about animals and the environment.
“It is our mission to influence your behavior through knowledge and fun. We are no longer just here for entertainment. We are making ourselves culturally relevant.”
That’s a big message and it may not mean much to a camel with a bum leg or a snake with a runny nose.
Animals don’t speak our language. They don’t have a clue as to why Barbiers is shooting them with darts, shining lights down their throats or making them swallow strange medicines.
Some would kill her if they had the chance. But there she is, nevertheless, trying to hear that secret language, solve those mysteries–and keep one old gorilla alive and kicking.
