Zoo Story (17 page)

Ellie’s first LH surge had declared itself that January. The Berlin boys had been notified and had already booked their flights for mid-February. Soon they would bring their scopes and their ultrasound equipment and arrange to gather DNA from a bull at Animal Kingdom outside Orlando. They didn’t want to collect the sample too far from Lowry Park, if possible; it was extremely difficult to freeze elephant semen without damaging it. Once they had the DNA, they would bring it directly to Ellie.

In the meantime, Brian and his staff prepared Ellie for her appointment with the Germans. Every day, they called her into the Hugger and rehearsed, so she wouldn’t be startled or scared during the actual procedure. Ellie seemed fine. In fact, she seemed to like standing in the Hugger, because her keepers always gave her more hay to distract her. As Ellie waited patiently, wrapping her trunk around another mouthful of feed, Brian French would stand in front of her, stroking her leg and praising her. It was one of the few times he got to be so close to the elephants, and it felt good.

Brian had grown up with free contact, first training with elephants as a child and then later at Ringling Bros. Like so many other veteran keepers, he missed the intimacy of those days. When Brian had been hired at the zoo, Lex had already decided that the handlers would only work with the elephants in protected contact. Brian had agreed. He knew that for Lex it was personal, because on the day Char-Lee Torre had died, Lex had stood with the paramedics, waiting for the helicopter to take her to the hospital. Though Brian had only worked at the zoo for a year, he knew that once Lex made up his mind about something, almost nothing would change it. Accepting these things did not mean that Brian had to love protected contact.

One way or another, he was happy to be working with elephants again. He had known so many over the years that the stories flowed out of him. He still talked about a circus elephant he’d known who recognized commands in four languages: English, German, French, and Hindi. Sitting in his office, he recalled the time when he was six, performing in Japan, and he and his family rode out a typhoon in a railway car with their elephants.

As a boy, Brian’s best friend was an elephant, owned by his family, named Shirley. “She was my elephant.” When he was only three or four, Shirley would raise him up with her trunk, and he would climb onto her head and then wrap himself around her neck. Against his face, she felt warm. His body moved up and down with the rise and fall of her breathing. Often, he would nod off.

“Some kids ride in cars and they fall asleep right away. For me it was elephants.”

So many years later, Brian would return to Shirley and the other elephants in his dreams. In these visions, he was small again, so light on their sloping backs. Sitting on high with a child’s hands, touching their thick skin as the great beasts carried him forward.

All that power, fluid and effortless, rippling underneath.

In the elephant barn,
the sacred and the scientific were being united. The two specialists from Berlin had arrived and were now trying to spark a new life inside Ellie.

She stood inside the Hugger, munching hay. By now she was accustomed to humans sticking her with needles and probing her body. Brian and another keeper, Steve Lefave, stood close by and reassured her.

“Steady,” they told her. “It’s all right.”

Brian and Steve were up front, near Ellie’s trunk. The two specialists, Drs. Hildebrandt and Göritz, were behind her, wearing helmets outfitted with ultrasonic goggles and plastic protective gear that covered their entire bodies. They looked like astronauts embarked on a perilous journey. Which was about right.

They had already inserted a catheter and an endoscope equipped with a light and a miniature video camera deep inside the opening of Ellie’s ten-foot-long reproductive tract; in female elephants, this is called a vestibule. They had also inserted an ultrasound probe into Ellie’s rectum, to follow the catheter’s path toward Ellie’s cervix on monitors positioned nearby. Early that morning, they had collected the DNA from the bull at Animal Kingdom. Other vets sometimes advocated gathering elephant semen by means of an electric shock to the rectum—a technique originally developed to allow paraplegic men to father children. Dr. Hildebrandt preferred not to rely on this technique, because he had learned from experience that the bulls sometimes were injured, either by the procedure or by the accompanying anesthesia. He found it more humane, and more effective, to reach a gloved arm inside the bull and manually stimulate the elephant until he ejaculated into a plastic sleeve.

Some would no doubt have snickered to even imagine such a thing. But for Dr. Hildebrandt, a boyish-looking thirty-nine-year-old with tousled brown hair, it was just another day in a remarkable career. Working with Göritz and other colleagues at the Institute for Zoo Biology, Hildebrandt specialized in reproductive medicine not just for elephants but hundreds of other species around the world. Known for his pioneering work in the use of ultrasound, he had probed the ovaries of Komodo dragons, tested the morphology and motility of rhino sperm, and evaluated the chemical signals transmitted in the urine of giant pandas. On the night the Berlin Wall fell and the streets of his city filled with ecstatic celebration, Hildebrandt was at the East Berlin Zoo, injecting a fertility drug into a rare yak.

“He’ll ultrasound just about anything that lives or crawls,” another zoologist once said.

Hildebrandt and his colleagues were best known for their unprecedented success at helping captive elephants deliver calves through AI. For years, no one else had managed to pull it off. Captive elephant populations in the United States were slowly dying off. Using ultrasound equipment and probes they designed themselves, the Berlin boys had radically advanced the scientific understanding of elephant reproductive anatomy and developed new procedures that highly increased the chances of a pregnancy.

Obtaining the DNA from the male elephant, it turned out, is the easy part. Delivering the semen to its destination is much more tricky. The opening to an elephant’s vagina is smaller than a dime—the mechanics of elephant reproduction do not require vaginal penetration by the male—and that opening is flanked by two false holes. “Blind pouches,” Hildebrandt called them. The opening to the female’s bladder is also nearby, complicating things even further. If the catheter doesn’t reach the right hole, neither will the semen. Sometimes the procedure took hours. But Ellie was fairly calm. The two vets from Berlin worked quickly, adjusting their instruments, reaching deep inside Ellie to accomplish what no bull had ever attempted. The lights in the elephant barn were turned low to make it easier for the team to study the ultrasound and video feeds. Everyone who was gathered around Ellie worked quietly so as not to startle the patient. If Ellie suddenly shifted or took a wrong step, the humans behind and underneath her could easily have been injured.

As Hildebrandt and Göritz maneuvered with their probes, they spoke softly to each other in German. When they needed help positioning their patient, they spoke in English to Steve, who repeated the request to Brian, who was standing directly in front of Ellie with one hand on her chest.

“I need her to back up a little,” said one of the vets, and then Steve told Brian, and then Brian told Ellie, and Ellie backed up.

“Good girl,” said Brian.

To the zoo, the procedure was a triumph. Ellie did not appear traumatized. The vet specialists had lived up to their reputation for scientific prowess. Outside Lowry Park, though, some would have characterized the achievement in different terms. Here was Ellie, an African-born elephant so accustomed to captivity that when she arrived at Lowry Park she had forgotten much of how to be an elephant. Here were the specialists, inserting an array of machines. What were the implications of this enterprise? Just because humans had the mastery to accomplish such a feat, did that make it right, or even advisable? If Ellie became pregnant, any calf she bore would grow up either at Lowry Park or inside another carefully controlled environment. If that calf went on to have offspring of its own, those descendants were likely to live in captivity as well. And then their descendants, and theirs, on and on. The same future awaited Enshalla and Eric and other captive species at Lowry Park and other zoos. One did not have to be a critic of zoos to wonder what would become of these animals if they were permanently removed from the natural world.

Dr. Hildebrandt, asked about these issues later, said the key was the level of care and the quality of their habitat. Was the elephant kept alone or allowed to form relationships with other elephants, as would happen in the wild? Were they in cramped quarters, or did they have room to move during the day?

“We should try to make the life of an elephant as optimal as possible,” said Hildebrandt. Lowry Park, he believed, had done an excellent job providing for its herd. He was impressed with the size of the yards and the expertise of Brian and Steve and the rest of the staff. Ellie and the other elephants appeared to be thriving. He also pointed out that the artificial insemination had not been performed simply in hopes of producing a calf. The procedure, he said, was crucial for Ellie’s own health. If female elephants don’t reproduce, they develop uterine cysts and tumors that can lead to cancer.

“It’s for the best for Ellie,” said Hildebrandt.

The respected doctor’s conclusions were logical, thorough, calm. Even so, the question remained of what captivity meant in the long run for all the species at Lowry Park. If a bird couldn’t fly, did it remain a bird? If a tiger could not hunt, did it slowly evolve into something more tame? As new generations of elephant calves were born at the zoo, would the herd gradually change in ways that could not be foreseen? Detached from the wild forever, would they cease to be elephants?

In the darkness beyond the edge of the sky, the satellite listened for manatee No. 9.

Five hundred miles above the planet’s surface, the satellite was halfway through another orbit. From this vantage point, Earth almost overwhelmed the field of vision. A curving expanse of blue and green and brown, it appeared vast enough for an endless multitude of life. And yet even from space it was easy to make out the devastation pushing so many species toward extinction. The melting of the polar ice caps. The fires consuming the Amazon rain forest. The toxic blossom of another Red Tide outbreak spreading off the west coast of Florida.

Year after year, a network of satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records the evidence of these and other catastrophes. The network gathers data on dozens of other missions for other researchers—taking infrared images of global cloud patterns, following the formation of thunderstorms and the path of hurricanes—and tracking manatees.

On March 16, 2004, as it crossed northward over the Caribbean and headed toward the middle of the United States, one of those NOAA satellites—known simply as M—was among several receiving signals sent by transmitters fastened to the tails of dozens of manatees in the waters around Florida. At 9:58 a.m., one of those signals reached M from the St. Johns River, from the transmitter attached to manatee No. 9, better known to hundreds of thousands of Floridians who grew up watching him, as Stormy. Born and raised in captivity and recently released into the wild, he was now trying, on a rain-soaked Tuesday morning, to elude the net of some humans who were attempting to capture him one last time.

“Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .”

On the tracking boat, they heard the signal first, growing louder as the transmitter rose toward the surface. Then they saw the transmitter, bobbing. Then, finally, Stormy appeared.

“Over there! Three o’clock!”

The transmitter—the team called it a tag—was on a short tether attached to a belt around the base of Stormy’s tail. Monica Ross, a biologist who has spent most of her life researching manatees, had fastened the tag and belt onto Stormy so they could track him by satellite and boat. Now Monica stood at the wheel of the tracking boat, her right hand steering, her left holding the antenna that picked up Stormy’s signal.

“Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .”

He was surfacing again.

“Tag up!” someone shouted. “He’s there!”

Three boats were moving along the river that morning, all filled with manatee researchers and with staff from SeaWorld and Lowry Park. Virginia Edmonds was on board, along with Dr. Murphy. Both had known Stormy for years and were pleased to see him thriving. The manatee was navigating the river so skillfully, he was frustrating the team’s efforts to catch him in their net.

“Our little Stormy isn’t stupid,” said one researcher. “Oh, no.”

Few on the boats had believed this day would ever come. Stormy had been born at the Miami Seaquarium in 1985 and was later moved to Homosassa Springs Wildlife Park. In 1990 he was sent to Lowry Park, where he became the first manatee to live at the zoo. He stayed there for the next twelve years until the team decided to give him a chance in the wild and released him in the relatively warm waters of Blue Spring State Park, on the St. Johns River. His first time out, in early 2002, Stormy struggled. He lost weight and seemed reluctant to venture away from the spring. So the team recaptured him and brought him back to Lowry Park. Once he recovered, the manatee had been released again into the same area with the transmitter attached to his tail. Now, a year later, Stormy was making the most of this second chance. He was holding his weight, had learned how to migrate to and from the spring, and had been seen socializing with other manatees. The team wanted to assess Stormy one more time, and if he looked healthy, they would remove the belt and transmitter for good. It was like a scene from
Born Free
, except it was set on a Florida river and Stormy had, in fact, not been born free at all.

“Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .”

On the boats, more joyous yelping.

“Tag up!”

“There he is!”

“See the bubbles?”

Stormy disappeared again. The researchers wiped the rain from their faces and smiled.

A speedboat roared by, rushing through a part of the river where people were supposed to slow down. Monica hissed.

Finally the research team got a net around Stormy and took him toward the shallows, where they wrapped him in a sling and carried him onto the banks.

Stormy looked good—so big and so well-fed he almost seemed like a different manatee.

“Did we catch the right animal?”

They were definitely going to remove the belt and the transmitter and let him go. But first, Dr. Murphy wanted to do one more health assessment.

“Let’s see if this old boy will hold still,” said Murphy. The vet made sure the team collected samples of Stormy’s blood and urine and skin and also took new measurements of his length and girth and weight. He was up to 1,090 pounds.

“Does anybody need a fecal?”

Amid all the prodding, Stormy decided he’d had enough and began to flex and roll.

“Get out of the way!” Murphy warned the others. He turned to Virginia Edmonds. “Virginia, talk to him.”

“Easy, Storm,” she said, leaning in. “Come on.”

Soon the manatee calmed down. They removed his transmitter and lifted him in the sling to carry him back into the river, detached from the technology of his rescuers. No more satellites would listen to him from above. No more boats would pursue him with nets. As he swam away, Stormy was finally on his own.

Applause from the team. A few tight faces, fighting back tears. They were sad because they wouldn’t be a part of Stormy’s life anymore, and happy because they knew they shouldn’t be.

Virginia let out a big sigh. “Oh, boy,” she said.

The team climbed back into their boats and headed toward home, wind in their faces, rain still rippling on the water.

“How happy are you?” someone asked Monica.

The biologist grinned. “Very happy,” she said. “Warm and mooshy happy.”

That spring taught
them all a new definition of hectic. The construction crews hurried to finish Safari Africa before the grand opening, and giraffes and zebras and warthogs were being unloaded from trucks, and Virginia and the crews seemed to be driving off every morning at dawn to release yet another manatee, and the primate department was admiring a new baby Colobus monkey—a surprise. The staff had not even been aware that one of the females was pregnant.

Kevin McKay walked by the Colobus enclosure one morning, and everything was normal. A few minutes later he passed by again and was startled to see a newborn male, still connected by the umbilical cord. Within a day or so, all of the females were competing to take care of the new baby. One would hold him, then another would snatch him away. Kevin suggested, to anyone who’d listen, that the little monkey should be named after him.

“I don’t think so,” said Lee Ann. She smiled and shook her head, knowing that Kevin was just practicing the art of being Kevin. He aspired, more than anything, to become an alpha and thought it would increase his chances if he could only get every male animal in the place christened in his honor. Kevin was a bunnyhugger, but not a baby-talking bunnyhugger. In his own way, he was classically male, trying to mark the entire zoo as his territory. When other departments weren’t looking, he would sneak into their offices and scribble his name on calendars, on bulletin boards, on any blank space available.

In the Asia department, Carie Peterson had declared a temporary truce in the war between her and the herps department. Carie had been hatching a plan to stock Dustin’s office with some Madagascar hissing cockroaches because she knew that Dustin, though he worked with spiders and millipedes, was terrified of roaches. She had wondered whether he would actually scream. But now she had no time for idle vendettas, because Enshalla finally appeared to be warming to the newly seductive powers of Eric. Most of the time she still growled. But on some mornings, she seemed smitten and rubbed against the mesh between their dens. Carie knew Enshalla was going into estrus because her urine was milky. Obviously, the time had arrived to chance putting the two tigers together.

The first meeting did not go well. Enshalla lowered herself close to the ground and began hunting Eric. He seemed oblivious to what was happening until she sprang at him and sent him running. Finally she cornered him and jumped onto his back. Watching on with a fire hose, the keepers sprayed water in the tigers’ direction until Enshalla retreated. Eric did not seem to realize that he was strong enough to defeat her in a second, which was probably for the best. Eric licked his paws, looking frightened and confused. Enshalla sprayed her scent, then climbed to the top of the tiger platform to declare her supremacy.

Still the queen.

The Asia staff would not accept defeat. Knowing that Enshalla would remain in estrus for several days, they were determined to pair the tigers again. Only this time, they had resolved to be less quick with the hose. It was better, they thought, to step back and let the tigers handle it on their own. Maybe they would figure it out. Love was never easy.

One morning, in the middle of the mating season, Carie and Kevin and others joined forces to clean the moat around the lemur exhibit. The night before, the water had been drained. Now, in their boots, the keepers raked and shoveled and hosed the wet green muck, from which they extracted orange peels and corn cobs and a blue racquetball and a Twix wrapper and a party horn, apparently left over from New Year’s. Oh, and coins.

“We’re doing pretty good,” said Andrea Schuch, the primate keeper. “I think we have seventy-six cents.”

They were sweating. They were trying not to touch their faces with their encrusted hands and trying not to inhale any whiffs of the ooze that surrounded them. Lemurs, they all knew, were dirty. The males staged stink wars, rubbing their tails onto scent glands on their arms, then waving the foul-smelling tails at one another. Cleaning the moat was a thankless task. And yet the keepers were laughing and singing and sporting shiny Mardi Gras beads around their necks. One of the women, covered in slime, sang a snippet from
West Side Story
.

“I feel pretty, oh so pretty! I feel pretty and witty and bright!”

Kevin, his face stained brown and green, began a dramatic recitation of every line from his favorite scene in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
. The one where a peasant deconstructs King Arthur’s explanation of how the Lady of the Lake granted him the monarchy when she handed him Excalibur.

“Listen,” said Kevin, channeling the accent of the peasant, “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.”

Andrea rolled her eyes, but he was only getting started.

“I mean, if I went around sayin’ I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me . . .”

Another keeper chimed in. “I didn’t know we had a king,” she said. “I thought we were an autonomous collective.”

Through the divide that separated the lemurs from the orangutans, Rango watched the keepers bantering. Over in the chimp enclosure, Rukiya peered from the top branch of the exhibit’s solitary tree. A moment later, she disappeared, and a pandemonium of screams and hoots erupted. Whatever had caused the disturbance, the keepers knew it was escalating; even from the depths of the lemur moat, they recognized the familiar thumping sound that meant Herman was hurling himself against the fake rock wall. It was probably nothing. Just to be sure, though, one of the keepers climbed from the lemur moat to go check. When it grew quiet again, everyone returned to the muck.

Kevin grabbed a stick and walked to the wall of the moat and scratched two words in the slime just below the waterline:
kevin rules.

With a stick of her own, Andrea added another word:
nothing.

They had to make it fun. How else could they have kept going? They worked from dawn to dusk for a pittance. At that time, a starting keeper at Lowry Park made $7.50 an hour. They would have done almost as well pushing Big Macs at the McDonald’s near the front gate. It was true, they got to work with animals—a passion for virtually all of them since childhood. But the job ground people up. Most keepers arrived at Lowry Park in their twenties, then moved on before their credit-card balances spiraled out of control. The zoo had no trouble hiring replacements. Other animal lovers were always clamoring for a position.

All day long, the keepers shoveled and raked and pushed wheelbarrows of dirt and hay and excrement. Sometimes the animals spit and threw things at them. The human visitors mocked them. When the keepers hauled another load of droppings, people would point and use them as an object lesson for their children.

“This,” the parents would say, as though the keepers could not hear them, “is why you need to go to college.”

On top of everything else, the work was dangerous. In case anyone at Lowry Park ever forgot, all he or she had to do was gaze into Char-Lee’s face in the photos on the wall of the break room. For most of them, the job was worth it, at least for a while. They lived on Mountain Dew, lame jokes, the camaraderie of those who know they are expendable. They made friends on the staff they would never forget; some got married. Every day, they were immersed in the endlessly diverting and surprising lives of species from around the world. Holding a baby chimp, releasing a manatee into freedom—these were thrills they knew they could find nowhere else. And sometimes, the heavens parted and showered them with moments of savage joy.

On the last Thursday in March,
the keepers in the Asia department bustled through their morning workload so they could get to the tiger sex. In the glow before sunrise, the keepers fed the tapirs and the muntjacs and the babirusa. They slipped a carrot to Naboo, then collected his droppings and saved them for Jamie, the young female rhino, so she could inhale Naboo’s scent and consider the possibility that someday they might be paired too, when she was old enough and big enough that he wouldn’t kill her.