Zoo Story Page 7

  “Even if a lion could speak,” Wittgenstein wrote in Philosophical Investigations, “we could not understand him.”

  The line was clever, but ultimately self-defeatist, since it suggested there was no point in even attempting to interpret animal behavior. It was also demonstrably wrong. In the decades since the famous comment had first been published, researchers had begun to decode the communications—verbal, visual, chemical, facial, electrical, vibrational, behavioral—of myriad species, from dolphins to fireflies. At Lowry Park, the keepers recognized that they would never understand everything about the animals in their care. But that didn’t stop them from trying. The primate staff knew that when Herman and the other chimpanzees grinned and showed their teeth, it meant not that they were laughing but that they were afraid. When Enshalla chuffed at her keepers, they recognized it as a greeting, not a threat. Wittgenstein might never have made his observation if he’d tried listening to elephants, whose communications have been extensively mapped. Field researchers among herds in Kenya and professors in a bioacoustics lab at Cornell University are working together to assemble a lexicon that catalogues the meanings of more than seventy distinct elephant calls. They can identify the rumble that matriarchs use to tell their herds to keep moving, the roar that warns intruders to keep their distance, the chorus of trumpetings that females sound to rejoice over the birth of another calf.

  It’s not farfetched, then, to try to reconstruct some semblance of what the long journey to captivity was like for the four elephants at Lowry Park. Although they arrived safely, some of the elephants’ behavior on the plane—Mbali’s apparent despondency, the bulls’ trumpeting and restless attempts to push through the walls of their crates—hinted at how difficult the trip must have been for them, despite the efforts to calm them. Anyone who has ever been squeezed into the middle seat of a passenger jet on a transatlantic flight has some notion of what it must have been like inside those crates. But to be confined for two full days without understanding where they were going or what was happening—lacking even the most basic notion of a plane—must have been disorienting almost beyond description. Surely some of the elephants had glimpsed the exterior of the 747 when they were first loaded into the hold, back in Africa. What did they think it was? All that time they were traveling across the Atlantic, did they believe they were inside the belly of some great winged creature?

  Imagine the landing in Tampa. Begin with what it must have been like to descend through the clouds—that curious sensation of slowly sinking, the leveling of the wings, the cascading change in altitude. What would that have felt like to an elephant? Did their ears pop? Then came the buzz of the landing gears lowering beneath their feet and the shaking from outside as the air resistance increased. Then the bump of the landing and the sense of rushing forward on solid ground and a roar from outside as the plane slowed and finally stopped. Something opened, and a series of unrecognizable faces and scents approached their crates. Then the whirring of the forklift and a groaning from the crane, accompanied by the sensation of being lifted and lowered. A rush of fresh air, the patter of rain. Night, unfurling outside the metal box that had become their world. A mechanical growling as they were propelled forward on the trucks. A forest of flashing lights. The thunk-thunk of helicopter blades, rotating somewhere above.

  The Swazi elephants would have recognized that last sound. Elephants throughout southern Africa had been fleeing from it for decades. These four had heard it when they were young calves in Kruger National Park and the culling teams came gunning for their herds. The metallic chop, approaching from the distance, was usually the harbinger of what was about to happen. The helicopters appeared overhead, and shots rang out, and then the families of the calves—their mothers and aunts, their younger siblings, everyone in their herd—dropped and did not get up. The lingering trauma to the generation of orphans spared in the Kruger culls was well-documented. But there was no way to know what exactly the four Swazi elephants remembered from the specific culls they had survived, or what associations might have been triggered by the presence of the police helicopter as they traveled that night through Tampa. Could they still feel the waves of panic and confusion washing through their herds as they stampeded through the bush? Did they recall standing in the swirling dust beside the bodies of their mothers? Did they see the white-uniformed disposal teams moving around them, slitting the throats of the fallen corpses with their pangas?

  The Swazi elephants had been visited by another helicopter only several months before their flight to the United States, when the game-park crew darted them from the air to knock them out before their transport to the boma. There was no way for the elephants to have known that this time the helicopter was on a different mission. For them, the darting would have almost certainly reverberated with echoes of the culls. Once again, a helicopter appeared, and elephants all around them collapsed to the ground. When the selected bulls and cows awoke in the boma, all they knew was that they had been taken away to someplace different, just as they were after the culls, and that the other members of their herd were gone.

  To the Swazi elephants, the chop of a helicopter was linked to memories—both old and recent—of dislocation, death, the end of everything they knew. In the midnight convoy through Tampa, as that sound ushered them toward the zoo, what could have been going through their minds? Did they wonder if they were being led to another kill zone? Did they brace for the crack of a rifle?

  Given everything else they had gone through since birth, perhaps it was not so surprising that they had shown such resilience during their journey from the Swazi bush to the concrete veldt of Tampa. In the months that had preceded their arrival in the United States, they had been cast as refugees, victims, tragic icons, political pawns, vessels of genetic hope. But the most reliable description was also the simplest: They were survivors. Somehow they had lived through not one but two death sentences, through a storm of legal wrangling and political grandstanding and through an epic voyage halfway across the globe. As night fell on the elephants’ first day in their new home, the staff at Lowry Park was already memorizing their names.

  Msholo.

  Matjeka.

  Sdudla.

  Mbali.

  They had been named by rangers inside Mkhaya and Hlane. Msholo, pronounced um-show-lo, roughly translated in siSwati as “the one who appears from nowhere”—an allusion to Ted Reilly and a lifetime of surprising poachers. Matjeka (muh-chay-guh) meant “skewed tusks.” Sdudla (stood-luh) meant “stout or sturdy.” Mbali (um-bahl-ee) translated to “pretty flower.”

  For now the four of them would remain out of sight, away from the public’s gaze. They would need several months to learn how to live inside a zoo. But soon, if all went according to plan, they would venture out into their exhibit and walk and throw dust on their backs and trumpet in front of Lowry Park’s visitors. Mothers and fathers with toddlers riding on their shoulders would draw near and point. Groups of schoolchildren would be told their names and, even though many would instantly forget those names, they would call out to the four of them, not knowing the wild place they came from, grasping nothing about the losses they carried, the memories swimming within them, everything they had endured to be standing here, on display in a zoo.

  Chapter 4

  Siren Song

  Inside the zoo, time was not human. More precisely, time moved outside human expectation. It did not settle into a single groove. Zoo time was fluid, changeable, unpredictable. It unfolded in different rhythms, at variable speeds, calibrated to the heartbeat and breathing patterns and behavior of each species.

  The staff and visitors wore wristwatches and carried cell phones adorned with digital displays of the hour and minute as agreed upon by Homo sapiens. But all of this fell away once people stepped inside the mini-aviary that was home to dozens of lorikeets—rainbow-hued parrots from Indonesia and Australia. To enter the lorikeet domain was to be absorbed into a cloud of otherness. The birds murmured and chattered and
swooped from every direction, their wings whirring like soft bursts from a velvet machine gun as they flew back and forth in a blur of blue and yellow and red. The lorikeets landed on visitors’ arms and shoulders and hair, then darted away, then came back. The birds meant no harm; they were simply curious and hoped for a sip of nectar from cups sold in the gift shop. Even so, people found their pulse accelerating, their own hearts beating faster, their sense of themselves becoming fragmented. Some were so overwhelmed they would lie on the ground until the birds went away. Others turned around and around, wondering where the next machine-gun burst would come from, and what made the lorikeets’ wings sound like that, and oh my God, how did nature turn up the dials enough to paint that shade of red in their chest feathers—a supercharged red constantly bursting like fireworks as the lorikeets careened above and around and back and forth in crisscrossing arcs.

  “Whoa,” the humans said, not even realizing that they had spoken.

  Inside that nebula of color and sound, the world sped up and slowed down simultaneously. Visitors forgot how long they had been standing there, even if it was only for thirty seconds, because the idea of a second and the notion of the number thirty were both out of reach. They had no time for time. They were caught up in the choreography of the lorikeets.

  Wherever people went at Lowry Park, whatever animal they watched, one construct of time was obliterated, and another construct replaced it. Once visitors emerged from the lorikeet aviary, they could walk over to the python exhibit, only a few steps away, and study the seventeen-foot reticulated python and the two carpet pythons and the three Burmese pythons, all curled like shiny still lifes on the other side of the glass, their heads turned toward the humans but not moving, their eyes open but unblinking, their coils betraying nothing. People wondered if the pythons would ever move. Time slowed to something close to a full stop—no longer a linear progression, but a breathless waiting. If it was feeding day, the keepers would deposit dead rabbits inside the exhibit, and then the pythons would uncoil toward their prey in a flash, almost too fast for the onlookers to follow. In that microsecond, as the rabbits’ ears and heads disappeared down the pythons’ throats, time became an explosion that blossomed instantaneously from inertia to lethal movement. Children, their faces pressed close to the glass, would gasp and cry out.

  Life was less violent over in the manatee exhibit. Visitors could walk down the tunnel that led to the underground viewing area and gaze as long as they liked, and they wouldn’t see the manatees eating anyone. The most aggressive behavior inside the pools came from the male turtles who swam beside the giant marine mammals and repeatedly tried to mount them through some insane overestimation of their sexual prowess. The manatees did tussle occasionally. Sometimes they bumped their heads into each other’s torsos or nudged each other with their tails. But these conflicts were fleeting and never resulted in injury. Most of the time, the manatees at Lowry Park lived up to the peaceful reputation of their species, spending their days quietly drifting around the pools, their bodies twisting and turning and slowly spinning as they nibbled on hydrilla and carrots. Occasionally they paused in front of the picture windows, suspended, and gazed toward the humans on the other side of the glass. If visitors stood there long enough, they soon relaxed, especially on a weekday afternoon when the zoo was quiet. Time became something graceful and seamless.

  If you happened to be on the other side of the pools, where the keepers worked from a deck along the water’s edge away from the bustle of the crowds, the sense of calm was hypnotic. You followed the gray shapes moving beneath you, tracing parabolas in the depths, and you heard the occasional splash of their tails and the eruptions of air that burst forth every few minutes as they raised their whiskered nostrils above the surface, breathed deeply, then dropped back below. Soon you found yourself waiting for the next exhalation, and your own breathing would slow. In the distance another human’s voice would break the silence, and suddenly you realized that you had lost track not only of the time but what day it was. Without even knowing it, you had slipped outside of yourself.

  Epiphanies like these were one of the reasons Lowry Park and other zoos endured. Despite all their flaws, zoos wake us up. They invite us to step outside our most basic assumptions. Offered for our contemplation, the animals remind us of nature’s impossibly varied schemes for survival, all the strategies that species rely upon for courtship and mating and protecting the young and establishing dominance and hunting for something to eat and avoiding being eaten. On a good day, zoos shake people into recognizing the manifold possibilities of existence, what it’s like to walk across the Earth, or swim in its oceans, or fly above its forests—even though most of the animals on display will never have the chance to do any of those things again, at least not in the wild.

  The staff at Lowry Park confronted this paradox every day. Only for them, it cut deeper because it was not an abstraction but a living, breathing reality that stared them in the eye. They understood, better than anyone else, the inherent difficulties of holding living creatures captive. But they also recognized that the public tends to romanticize nature. They knew that the notion of freedom is a human invention and that creatures in the wild are rarely free and are in fact confined by territory, hunger, and the constant threat of predators.

  Against all this logic, some staff members still wished sometimes there was some way they could let the animals go.

  “Any good keeper absolutely feels a guilty conscience,” a veteran on the staff confided one evening after Lowry Park was closed. “There are definitely days when you walk in and you look at the animals, and you say, ‘I wish they didn’t have to be here.’ ”

  The only part of the zoo where the paradox got turned inside out—where animals were routinely returned to their native habitat—was the manatee section, which featured not only the viewing pools but a small hospital built around medical tanks. The sirens, as some called them, came in torn up by boat propellers or tangled in fishing line or suffering from cold stress, the marine version of frostbite. Sometimes they were on the edge of death from toxins they’d ingested during another outbreak of red tide. Lowry Park would slowly nurse them back to health, pumping them full of antibiotics to fight infections, feeding them vitamins to help them build back their strength, even performing surgery when necessary. Once the patients recovered, they were eventually set free again. Over the past decade the zoo had released sixty-four manatees back into the wild.

  “We take ’em in, patch ’em up, and send ’em out,” said Dr. Murphy. It was a beautiful promise that reminded the staff why they worked at Lowry Park. Delivering on that promise was one of the more difficult logistical challenges at the zoo. Working with wild creatures that often weighed close to a ton required patience and brute strength. If Murphy needed to draw blood or gather a fecal sample—relatively routine procedures with most of the other species—the staff would isolate the manatee in a medical tank, then drain the water so that several people could climb in with the vet and hold the patient down. The keepers would drape themselves over the manatee’s body. They tried to be gentle; they would stroke the manatee’s thick skin and coo and tell it to relax. But they had to hold the animal as still as possible. If it decided to roll or lash out with its tail, one of the keepers could easily wind up with a broken leg.

  “Watch it,” Murphy would tell the team when a manatee began to thrash. “Let him calm down a minute.”

  Manatees did not appreciate being handled. Often, they would expel prodigious amounts of droppings as the humans worked on them. Murphy, accustomed to such indignities, seemed not to notice when the dung oozed between his toes.

  As exhausting and hazardous as these procedures were, keepers from all over the zoo happily volunteered to help, especially when it came time to assist in a release. Nothing was more satisfying to the staff than seeing a manatee healed and returned to open water. A team would maneuver a giant sling under the animal, and a crane could lift it onto a bed of mats insi
de a truck. Keepers would sit in back with the manatee, dousing it with water and monitoring its breathing while Murphy drove to the release point. Usually they tried to release the manatees fairly close to wherever they’d initially been found—a river, a freshwater spring, an inlet off the Gulf of Mexico. The team would attach a satellite transmitter to a belt around the manatee’s tail, so researchers could follow its progress in the months ahead, and then hoist it down to the water and watch it swim away. Cheering was common. So were tears.

  Not all of the manatees made it back to the wild. Often they arrived at Lowry Park in such forlorn condition that they didn’t survive. The odds were particularly daunting with newborn calves whose mothers had abandoned them or been killed. Many of these orphans died shortly after they were found, before a rescue team could rush them to the rehab center. The calves that did reach the zoo still faced an uphill struggle. They’d lost their mothers. They couldn’t nurse. They had trouble adapting.

  “They don’t know the ways of the world,” said Virginia Edmonds, the assistant curator of Florida mammals, who oversaw the manatee section along with Dr. Murphy.

  One day in May of 2003, not long before the elephants arrived from Swaziland, two fishermen in a boat in the waters of Buttonwood Bay, near Naples, spied a small gray leathery object on a beach and realized it was a newborn calf, maybe a day old, stranded and apparently abandoned by its mother. The calf was brought to Lowry Park, where the staff dubbed him Buttonwood. Usually they named the manatees after the body of water where they had been found; it was a way of remembering where the animals came from, and where the keepers hoped they would eventually return. For Buttonwood, as with all abandoned calves, the first forty-eight hours were crucial. If they could make it through two days, their chances improved dramatically.