Zoo Story (4 page)

The Reillys heard the news and began the final preparations in the boma. It was time to get the elephants into the air.

The 747’s engines
droned on and on. Mick, still standing, had lost track of time. All he knew was that the sun had finally left the sky and that they were flying in darkness again. A little while ago, they had stopped in Barbados for refueling. Now they were headed for Florida.

The elephants appeared to be holding up well in their crates. Extra doses of Azaperone had calmed the bulls and soothed Mick’s fears of disaster. Still, he knew the trip could not be easy for them. After all this time in the air, they had to be hungry.

“Kunekudla lukunengi,”
he told them.
There’s lots of food where you’re going.

Mbali, the little one, was quiet again. She had been sleeping, off and on. Was she dreaming? Did she still feel the jolt in the boma, when the other elephants pushed her into the electric fence? Did she see herself back in the park, wandering through the leopard grass and umbrella thorns?

Inside the hold, among the crates, there was a shift in equilibrium. The plane was descending through the clouds, toward a grid of shimmering light.

Tampa.

Dawn, and already the highway was overrun. A chorus of muttered curses rose from the great steel and chrome herd jammed, snout to tail, in the middle of another morning migration along Interstate 275 toward the towers of downtown Tampa.

Trapped inside their climate-controlled cars, alone with their cell phones and their iPods and their satellite mapping systems, the drivers fought back the urge to swerve onto the shoulder and break free. Instead they inched forward, thumping fists on steering wheels, snarling at other cars that drifted into their lane, allowing themselves a few controlled bursts of aggression even as they stayed in line.

Just off the Sligh Avenue exit, another chorus was sounding. The drivers couldn’t hear it. But it was there.

At Lowry Park Zoo, the beasts were waking.

The Malayan tapirs whistled, calling to one another in the early morning light. The orangutans lounged in the rope netting of their exhibit and sighed their philosophical sighs. Through serrated teeth dripping with toxic saliva, the Komodo dragons hissed. From their hiding places under the rocks and logs, the clouded leopards—secretive and mysterious and nearly invisible in the shadows—panted and meowed. A raven cawed and flapped its black wings; a leopard gecko yowled, sounding almost like a cat. The hammerkops cackled; the New Guinea singing dogs barked; and the sloth bears snuffled and sniffed, their long, curved claws clicking on the rocks as they padded out into the sun. A fever of Southern stingrays, flying in slow-motion circles around their shallow pool, were silent except for the tiny splashes of their wingtips cresting the surface.

High above them all, Cyrus and Nadir serenaded each other with another duet in the sky. The male and female siamangs—Asian gibbons, with long arms and thick black fur and big bulging throat sacs—swung from poles thirty feet in the air as they traded the exact same sequence of hoots and wails that they performed every day. Mated for life, the siamangs sang to seal their bond, to declare their shared history, to warn away intruders. Their duets carried to every corner of the zoo, cutting through the recorded jungle drums beating incessantly from the P.A. system.

Other songs joined the soundtrack. Cries of desire and hunger, protest and exultation. A multiplicity of voices from nearly every continent, at nearly every frequency, of almost infinite variation. Hearing them together on a bright, clear morning was to contemplate the audacity of creation. Not just God’s audacity, but man’s.

From the argus pheasants to the goliath bird-eating spiders, each of Lowry Park’s sixteen hundred animals offered living proof of nature’s endless gift for invention. In the curves of their skulls, in the muscles of their wings, in their blood and bones and the twisting nucleotides of their DNA, each carried millions of years of the planet’s biological history. But their presence inside these walls also testified to the epic self-regard of the species that had seen fit to build the zoo and so many others like it around the world.

Taken together, the narratives of how the animals ended up at Lowry Park revealed as much about Homo sapiens as they revealed about the animals themselves. The precise details—how and where each was born, how they were separated from their mothers and taken into custody, all they had witnessed and experienced on their way to becoming the property of this particular zoo—could have filled an encyclopedia with insights into human behavior and psychology, human geopolitics and history and commerce. Lowry Park’s very existence declared our presumption of supremacy, the ancient belief that we have been granted dominion over other creatures and have the right to do with them as we please. The zoo was a living catalogue of our fears and obsessions, the ways we see animals and see ourselves, all the things we prefer not to see at all. Every corner of the grounds revealed our appetite for amusement and diversion, no matter what the cost. Our longing for the wildness we have lost inside ourselves. Our instinct to both exalt nature and control it. Our deepest wish to love and protect other species even as we scorch their forests and poison their rivers and shove them toward oblivion.

All of it was on display in the garden of captives.

By now
the sun was climbing in the sky. The front gates weren’t open yet, but the staff was busy feeding the animals and raking the empty exhibits and searching for any trash that might have blown or been tossed into the enclosures. When they were done, they shifted the animals into the open air of their exhibits, ready for public viewing.

An Indian rhino, seeing his keeper, ran over and pressed against the thick gate that separated them. Begging for attention, he whimpered like a puppy.

“Hi, Naboo,” said the keeper, scratching his snout through the bars.

The rhino’s official name, the name shared with the public, was Arjun. But in private the staff called him Naboo, after a planet in
Star Wars.
They loved bestowing the animals with
Star Wars
names. There was an otter named Chewbacca and a camel who answered (or didn’t) to Leia. One of the young howler monkeys had been christened Anakin, as in Anakin Skywalker, which was Darth Vader’s name before he grew up and went to the dark side. The name made sense, because howler monkeys are born with tan fur and then turn black as they mature. It was an inside joke. A keeper thing.

In the herps department, the section of the zoo reserved for snakes and turtles and other cold-blooded creatures, the blue poison-dart frogs were peeping, very softly, inside a small warm closet clouded with manmade mist. The room was designed to replicate, as much as possible, the atmosphere of a rain forest. The males planted their legs on the rocks beneath them, the heart-shaped pads at the ends of their toes gripping like tiny suction cups. Their bodies were so bright blue, they seemed radioactive. Their calls to the females were so quiet, they were almost drowned out by the hum of the ventilation system.

Poison-dart frogs were vanishing from the wild. All over the globe, from the forests of Panama to the spray zones of waterfalls in Tanzania, frogs and toads were dying off. So many species were disappearing so quickly—disappearing much faster than the mass extinctions that had wiped out the dinosaurs—that there was no time to save even a sampling of them all for posterity. Many of these species would simply fade away. Others, selected for survival, would live out the rest of their time on Earth in aquariums and zoos, in small rooms like this one at Lowry Park.

At the zoo, every day was another lesson on living in a world where there were no more pure choices.

Inside the birds-of-prey building, the cement block walls echoed with screeches and caws and chittering mating calls. A parade of raptors—a bald eagle, a merlin falcon, a Eurasian eagle owl, and a pair of Harris hawks—stood at their perches, talons clasping tightly. In the wild they would have been swooping down on voles and rabbits and salmon. Bald eagles have been known to grab dogs and to attempt to lift small children into the air. Harris hawks are famed for hunting above the desert in coordinated teams. Now their dark eyes shined as they waited for someone to bring them another offering from a nearby freezer full of rodents. “Ratsicles,” the staff called them.

A trainer extended her arm toward a black vulture named Smedley. Time for his daily weighing.

“What do you say, bubba?”

Smedley shuffled from foot to foot, considering the invitation. Then the trainer offered him a tidbit of dead quail and cued him with a little sound.

“Doop!” she said, and the vulture flew onto her arm to claim his treat.

The department worked with almost any bird brought to their door. They nursed baby screech owls that had tumbled from nests, peregrine falcons that had crashed into power lines, hawks and eagles with birth defects that would have led them to starve in the wild. Some of the birds had been born into captivity and were too dependent on humans to ever make it on their own. Others eventually recovered and were given a chance to fly away for good. The staff found it deeply satisfying to help the birds heal and then set them loose, watching them power toward the trees. But the transition was rarely simple, especially after the birds grew accustomed to the zoo’s routine and to the presence of the humans and the steady diet of ratsicles. The keepers tried to ease their way back into the wild with a protocol known as “a soft release.” Instead of simply abandoning the birds, they would let them go at the end of the day, but leave a supply of food for them in case they weren’t ready to strike out on their own. Sometimes, after a few nights of experimenting with freedom, the birds would not be seen again. Sometimes they would find it too hard to break away and never leave.

Not long ago, the staff had tried a soft release with a young mourning dove named Myrtle. Someone had found her as a newborn squab, on the ground and away from her nest, and then brought her to Lowry Park. A ball of fluff, she weighed less than an ounce and still lacked most of her feathers. For weeks her handlers nursed her. They cradled her in their hands, listened to her coo, made a little home for her in a small enclosure outside the building, safely away from the bigger birds. Though it was impossible to avoid becoming attached, they knew it was time to let her go when she began experimenting with test flights, flitting and hopping. The wings of mourning doves tend to whistle, especially when they’re taking off and landing, and it made her handlers happy to hear that explosion of musical fluttering as they said good-bye and watched her dart into the late-afternoon sky. But every morning, she came back. To thwart her homing instinct, the department supervisor took her to his house, fifty miles away, and tried another release in a big field out back. The first couple nights, Myrtle stayed close. Then one morning the supervisor couldn’t hear her cooing anymore. At last she was on her own.

One night not long afterward, one of the other trainers dreamed about Myrtle. In the dream, the dove returned to Lowry Park yet again. This time, she didn’t return to her roost outside. Instead she flew through an open door into the birds-of-prey building and landed near the red-tailed hawk. Always ready for another snack, the hawk seized and devoured her.

Days later, the dream still haunted the trainer. She wasn’t sure how to interpret it. Was it a foreboding that something terrible had happened to Myrtle once she was back in the wild, vulnerable to predators? Perhaps it was a parable, bubbling up through the subconscious, on the difficulties of introducing new creatures into the garden, even with every intention of setting them free.

Across that long summer of 2003,
Lowry Park waited for the elephants. In federal court the battle over the Swazi Eleven raged on. PETA and the rest of the animal-rights coalition hurled accusations and innuendoes. Wildlife lovers from around the world e-mailed fiery protests. Weary of the stress and drama, the staff at Lowry Park wondered when, if ever, the case would be over and the elephants would start toward their new lives in Florida and California.

The war kept escalating. Animal-rights protesters gathered in front of Lowry Park to wave signs that proclaimed
swazi elephants: born free, sold out
. PETA, with its gift for macabre theatrics, staged a media event outside the San Diego Zoo, cheering as a man dressed in a fuzzy gray elephant costume parked a rented dump truck in front of one of the zoo’s entrances and unloaded a large mound of horse manure onto the street. The elephant man would not leave the truck until the police summoned a locksmith and led him away in handcuffs. By then he had removed the head of his costume so that he could issue a statement to the news crews.

“I’m going to be in jail for a while,” he said. “But those elephants are going to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.”

While the fate of the Swazi Eleven remained in limbo, Lowry Park added to its collection with a stream of other animals. The northern section of the grounds, undeveloped until now, crawled with bulldozers and construction crews, all of them erecting acres of new exhibits designed to showcase African species. If the importation went forward, the elephants were to be the centerpiece—not just of the new wing, but of a completely new vision for the zoo.

Lowry Park was in a hurry to get bigger. Reinventing itself for a new century, the medium-sized zoo was deep into the most ambitious and most daring expansion of its history, a radical overhaul almost entirely dependent on the elephants. The potential gains for the zoo—increased profits, higher visibility—were almost as huge as the animals themselves. For years, Lowry Park had surveyed visitors on which species they most wanted the zoo to add to the collection, and every time, elephants were number one. But the risks inherent in the plan were also enormous.

Beloved as they were, elephants tested a zoo’s limits. They were expensive to feed and house, they were extremely dangerous to work with, and their very nature—their independence and intelligence, their emotional sensitivity, their need to bond with other elephants and walk for miles a day—made it difficult to provide them with surroundings in which they would not lapse into misery. At a time when some American zoos were considering closing their elephant exhibits for good due to these ethical and logistical problems, it was striking for a zoo to consider adding any elephants at all, even those raised in captivity. To rip them from the wild and use them to crown an upgraded collection was incendiary. The plan had already catapulted Lowry Park into the public spotlight as never before. If anything went wrong, either during the flight or after the new arrivals settled in, the zoo would be cast into disgrace. Animal-rights organizations from around the world would point to any such failure as proof that elephants did not belong in zoos, period.

Until that summer, Lowry Park would have seemed an unlikely target for international furor. The place was too small, too low-profile—a respected zoo, accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and known for its commitment to endangered Florida species, but not particularly flashy. With the move to bring in the wild elephants, the zoo was announcing that it was ready to step onto a bigger stage and embrace a whole new set of possibilities and challenges.