Glass actions and good intentions
15 May 2012 Leave a Comment
in Beyond the zoo: Nature trips & thoughts, Russia's Grizzly Coast Tags: bears
It’s bear-wrestling season at the zoo, featuring Haines and Kenai! I never get tired of watching the boys play-fight, witnessing guests’ delight and offering explanations such as “He’s not really hurting him” — or, in response to this scene seen through water-smeared glass the week before last, “It’s not what it looks like.”
It’s true that the play-fighting gets a bit rough, and Haines sometimes does hurt the blonder, more submissive Kenai — a little, and probably not on purpose. Each weekend, volunteers receive an email report of goings-on among the animals, passed down from volunteer coordinator Heidi through our “day captains.” Two days after this vigorous session, Heidi’s email disclosed that Kenai (not for the first time) had received a bleeding facial scratch during the previous weekend’s frolics. She also disclosed that while zoo staffers were examining the scratch, Kenai snarfed down a whole package of dog food, suggesting a certain robustness of body and spirit. And as you can see in the photo below, taken four days after the scratch, he seemed ready to wrestle some more — and had every opportunity to get out of the water, where the wrestling always occurs.
There’s a world of difference between watching large predators through glass, where kids go nose-to-nose with furry beasts like these bears, and seeing them through bars or other barriers. I was reminded of this recently when a friend asked my opinion of a video that had gone viral: a baby in a zebra hoodie being “remotely” pawed and mouthed by the lion on the opposite side of a glass barrier at the Oregon Zoo. Enough Googling will show you a similar video from one zoo or another, year after year. The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo gave the best response I’ve seen about the protective power of laminated safety glass, and the furor over the zebra-hoodie child, in my opinion, had more to do with varying parenting styles than anything else. The child by the glass was clearly safe. Of those who frowned upon the video, though, some were more concerned about whether the lion was being taunted. Because lion and baby were both physically fine, it all boiled down to kindness and concern, or perceived lack thereof. The video’s joke, for those who found it funny, was that neither the baby nor the lion was in on the joke. And that same fact upset those who knew the baby was safe but still objected to the video.
As a volunteer at a zoo that has the utmost concern for creatures in its care, I’ve seen plenty of nose-to-nose moments through glass. Several appear elsewhere on this blog. Large mammals fascinate children, and vice-versa; the glass creates a weird, delightful intimacy that would never occur in the wild. If paws and mouths get involved, and grownups start laughing, and it all goes from Facebook to TV news site, we’ve seen that a minor controversy can erupt. But when those animal-child moments are quiet and private, with a spirit of reverent respect, then they’re golden.
Brookfield Zoo: our dolphin connection
10 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in Beyond the zoo: Nature trips & thoughts, Visits to other zoos Tags: bears, dolphins
For several years, I’ve had a yen to see the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago. Long ago, my husband’s oldest sister was a zookeeper there; more recently, dolphins have flowed back and forth between our two zoos, based on the best breeding prospects and who gets along with whom. Last week on vacation, after visiting family in Illinois, my husband and I made a detour to check out the whole zoo, and especially its marine mammals.
Of this seven-member pod, five are my old buddies. Potential breeder Chinook went back to Brookfield after an uneasy stint in Discovery Bay with our male Semo, who claimed all baby-daddy privileges anyway. Tapeko and her young daughters Noelani and Allison (that oh-so-human name always made us volunteers smile) spent a few months with us last year while the pool you see above was being revamped. Spree, now an eight-year-old, got along with that trio so swimmingly that she left with them when they returned to Chicago. The last I heard, Brookfield had plans to set her up with Chinook.
Brookfield’s underwater viewing area is a lot like ours. Watching the seven bottlenose friends do pre-show laps together, I picked out Spree easily based on her underbelly tooth-rake marks. (Those marks are a normal sign of dolphin-to-dolphin social conflict; Spree got along less well with our current Minnesota dolphins than she does with these guys.)
I’m not sure if that’s Spree with a trainer above, but that’s definitely Chinook on the right with trainer Mark. Each trainer paired up with the same dolphin for the duration of the 20-minute twice-daily show, which has been a staple for the zoo’s 50-year history.
The grizzly side of Brookfield’s Bear Wilderness (across from the polar-bear side) is a lot like our grizzly exhibit, too, but with a two-tiered viewing area, a deeper pool and a smaller, Yellowstone Park-like species of brown bear. Rather than play-fight with a friend like our massive Alaskan/Russian species, the one grizzly we saw last week captivated the crowd by floating around on his back, with just his nose and paws above water. (Our prime ursine swimmer Kenai, on the other hand, always amuses the crowd by fastidiously keeping his ears dry.)
It would take me weeks to tell you everything I saw in a day at Brookfield, but this plaque sums it up well with a quote by naturalist John Muir. In a sprawling zoo the size of a small town, I still got that feeling of interconnectedness: plant to animal, animal to human, weaving a web of mutual sustenance, shelter and education. Our zoos share dolphins and a message, too.
