Sophistication : U.S. Zoos--a New Breed Is Emerging

So what’s new at the zoo?

At New York’s Bronx Zoo, an enclosed $9-million “Jungle World” will open in June, in which visitors will stroll along an elevated walkway inside exhibits containing giant water monitor lizards, monkeys, tapirs, gibbons and other creatures of the rain forest. The exhibits will be hot and humid, with real foliage, occasional mist and natural lighting.

At the Dallas Zoo, a $75-million expansion calls for a monorail to take visitors on a 20-minute ride of varying heights: at water level, for viewing river-bank animals; treetop, through the monkey exhibit; then, at sand level through a desert habitat, back up through an aviary and then passing head-high past giraffes.

Fantasy Excursion

At the Philadelphia Zoo’s multi-sensory “Treehouse,” built at a cost of $2.2 million and which opened April 10, youngsters on a fantasy excursion can climb into the darkness of a huge bird egg and hear the brooding mother, feel the crevices in a bee’s honeycomb or get inside a frog, peer through its eyes and reach through its mouth. If the child grabs onto a dangling fly, the frog gulps.

And at the San Diego Zoo, a bird aviary uses a mesh that is so unobtrusive and lets so much natural light through that the visitor may forget he is walking inside a cage as rare and colorful birds nest and fly within feet of him.

Throughout the country, zoos are going through an expensive face-lift as they look for newer, more sophisticated ways to drum home the message that man is the steward of wildlife and its habitat.

Some of the changes around the country are dramatic. Multimillion-dollar exhibits are being designed to totally “immerse” the zoo visitor into the animal’s habitat, giving him the sense that he is in the animal’s kingdom, not vice versa.

Touches of Subtlety

More subtle changes are occurring, too, ranging from the use of wildlife quizzes and trivia games on computer terminals to exhibit signs designed to educate the visitor about the plight of endangered animals.

All the while, zoos are attempting to strike the elusive balance between too much showmanship and too much scholarship. While zoo directors want to send visitors home with a raised consciousness of the natural world, they acknowledge that most people go to zoos to be entertained.

“Our motto is, ‘That’s Entertainment!’ ” said Clayton Freiheit, director of the Denver Zoo. “It would be wonderful if we could say, ‘That’s Education!’ but if we did, nobody would come.”

So while you may no longer see a costumed chimpanzee riding a bicycle (try the circus, thank you), you will hear cockatoos imitating Ethel Merman (because a cockatoo’s natural behavior is to imitate), you will see elephants play harmonicas (to demonstrate the function and dexterity of its trunk) and you will see a raccoon knock over a trash can on cue (because raccoons do that sort of thing in the wild).

Zoos are entering their third generation of intellectual and physical development. With more expensive exhibits generally being built larger and with more natural landscaping, today’s zoo visitor has to walk farther for a better view, and often has to patiently search through foliage and behind rocks and trees to spot his subject.

This is in stark contrast to the first-generation modern zoo, with its strings of small cages housing a tired menagerie of exotic animals that were displayed as little more than freaks in a living museum. If one animal died, the owner bought another.

Beginning in the late 1920s, the nation’s zoos took a cue from their European counterparts and began displaying animals behind open moats or water, instead of bars. In the United States, the San Diego Zoo was a forerunner. At the same time, zoo directors, not unlike stamp collectors, feverishly worked to expand their animal inventory.

Most recently, zoos discovered the aesthetic flaws of concrete grottoes that, while sanitary, hardly suggested a natural habitat. And curators realized that zoos could no longer be consumers of wildlife, but rather had to become a producers as animals became extinct in the wild. So zoos embarked on breeding programs.

Today, zoos are scraping for money--competing for tax dollars and for philanthropic gifts with hospitals, libraries, museums and symphonies--to build entirely new exhibits or to renovate the moat-and-concrete ones in favor of ones that utilize soil, grass, rocks and trees (or, in some cases, fake rocks and fake trees). And sometimes, as at the Bronx zoo, visitors are being invited inside the exhibit where they can smell the animals and feel the rain.

The modern zoo displays both animal and a re-creation of its habitat as a single package and, increasingly, compatible species of animals are grouped together in the same enclosure.

Some zoos are turning their backs on the exotic in favor of preserving more local habitats and animals. The Audubon Zoological Gardens in New Orleans, for instance, is building a Louisiana swamp exhibit. “Our entire city used to be a swamp and we spent millions of dollars to get rid of it, and now we’re spending millions to bring it back,” said director Ron Forman. “Some people are laughing about it, but others say it is our role to preserve it.”

In recent years, zoo research staffs around the country also have made remarkable progress in the breeding of endangered wildlife, beyond even the frontier of artificial insemination and the exchange of semen from one zoo to another. Today, embryos are implanted in surrogate mothers of different animal species altogether. Zoos no longer boast of the size of their own collection, but talk about breeding specific species and lending animals to other zoos. It might well be that the animal most admired at the local zoo doesn’t belong to that zoo at all.

Indeed, zoo directors today talk of a national collection of animals, housed at various facilities around the country and tracked through a nationwide computer network, maintained at the Minnesota Zoo and called the International Species Inventory System.

“It is meaningless for a zoo to pride itself on having the largest collection in the world,” said Dr. Warren Thomas, director of the Los Angeles Zoo. “That sort of zoo is a dinosaur. There is a need to reduce the level of redundancy, and instead for there to be more specialization and greater cooperation.”

Thomas’ remarks might seemed to be aimed at the San Diego Zoo and its sister San Diego Wild Animal Park, which together have about 5,400 animals, the largest collection in the United States and second in the world only to the West Berlin Zoo, which has 8,000.

But the message of specializing in fewer species of animals has not been lost on San Diego; at its peak, the zoo alone had more than 1,000 species (compared to 600 today) and more than 4,000 animals, compared to 3,200 today. The Wild Animal Park has 2,200 animals representing 225 species, compared to the 975 animals representing 150 species when it opened as an overflow and breeding reserve in 1972.

In interviews with The Times, zoo directors from throughout the nation agree that today’s zoo has several purposes: to offer light recreation, to educate the visitor about wildlife, to conserve wildlife and to conduct animal research.

A Difficult Balance

There is considerable debate, however, on where the zoo should place its emphasis--and its financial resources. Dr. William Conway, director of the distinguished New York Zoological Society, puts it this way:

“It is terribly difficult to hit a balance. Those who argue on behalf of increased public amenities (such as food stands, rides and non-animal attractions) at the zoo say that if you don’t offer that, then the public won’t spend its money and time at the zoo, and you won’t have any money to provide better (animal) bedrooms.

“Others say, if we don’t provide more thoughtful and considerate facilities for the gorillas, you won’t have any gorillas and without them you won’t have a zoo.

“Others say bus rides and gorilla bedrooms are important, but if we don’t do research on their reproductive physiology, you won’t be able to breed them anyway and no matter how many people you bring in, there won’t be any gorillas for them to see.

“Others say why worry about gorillas anyway, since there are 35,000 of them in nature, and instead we should focus our attention on the Asiatic white crane because there are only a few hundred of them.

“Others say why worry about the zoo at all, because there are places like the San Diego Wild Animal Park with its 1,800 acres where the propagation program can be expanded and a real contribution can be made.

“And the others say you should focus on the zoo because that’s where people want to go. They love the zoo.”

Indeed, zoos--by their very nature--are compromises because after all, animals weren’t designed to live in zoos.

David Hancocks, an architect who was director of Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo for eight years through last year and designed the zoo’s renowned naturalistic gorilla exhibit, which cost $500,000 to build in 1979, defines the challenge of designing a successful zoo:

“When I go to a zoo, I walk around and come away feeling vaguely depressed, whereas if I go to see animals in the wild, it’s always an exciting, uplifting, wonderful experience. Zoos have to capture some of the excitement of seeing animals in the wild.

“It sounds simple and obvious, but trying to do it is the challenge. Visual purity has to be achieved, so if you showed someone a picture of an animal, they wouldn’t know if you went to Africa or the zoo.”

Hancocks’ gorilla exhibit was designed to allow gorillas to actually hide from zoo visitors by sneaking behind knolls in the exhibit for snatches of privacy. It may be psychologically beneficial to the gorilla, but people complain when they can’t see the gorillas, he said.

At the Los Angeles Zoo, an enclosed, $1-million koala exhibit was opened in 1982, featuring a light-reversal system so visitors could spy on the endearing Australian marsupials at “twilight” hours, when koalas tend to be more active. And while the koalas were more active, visitors then complained that the room was so dark they could not take photographs.

$100-Million Facility

And consider the complaints heard at the North Carolina Zoological Park, a new, sprawling 1,300-acre facility in the middle of the state that is opening in phases and will not be completed for another 20 years, at a cost of $100 million in state funds.

“We’re designing it to give the visitor the feeling he’s encroaching in the animal’s habitat. That takes more space and you can’t show as many animals, and for people that means a little more work (in viewing the exhibit),” said Director Robert L. Fry. “If he wants to see a zebra, an ostrich or a giraffe (in the zoo’s 40-acre African Plains exhibit), he may have to walk a quarter mile for a good view. He can’t just walk up to a cage. We get some criticism from that because people are lazy.”

Criticism of zoos is not the exclusive domain of the zoo visitor. Some of the harshest critics are the zoo directors themselves.

While Seattle’s Hancocks, for instance, is proud of his gorilla exhibit, he adds this: “You ought to see our old ape house (which is still used). It looks like some abandoned bus depot in downtown Detroit.”

Palmer Krantz, director of the Riverbanks Zoo at Columbia, S.C., tells of the effort to build a state-of-the-art polar bear exhibit, complete with an underwater viewing room. “The exhibit opened 11 years ago, and it has been closed five years out of that because of one problem or another. The public had to go down a narrow passageway into a dead-end room, so there were traffic flow problems. Then the filtration didn’t work right, and the water’s not clear.”

Here is what Thomas says about his Los Angeles Zoo:

“When it was built 20 years ago, it was one colossal bomb unto itself. Much of our effort in the last 20 years has been correcting original sin, redoing things that shouldn’t have been done in the first place. The plumbing is inadequate, the electrical is inadequate, there were displays with no holding facilities, too many bars and wires, more damn bears than you could shake a stick at, too many exhibits and too many cul-de-sacs. Our zoo is one big cul-de-sac.”

If there is any prideful arrogance in the zoo world, it might be found at the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Wild Animal Park. San Diego Zoo executives don’t talk about what they have done wrong, but only on how to improve on what they’ve got.

“We have wound up with what is now the greatest zoo operation in history,” said Sheldon Campbell, president of the San Diego Zoological Society and chief booster. “You can’t find anything that remotely equals what we have.”

Indeed, no other zoo operation in the world comes close to San Diego’s annual $45-million operating budget.

Emphasis at the San Diego Zoo these days is in renovating a row of cat and dog exhibits--some of which date back to the late 1920s and mirror that day’s concrete-behind-moat philosophy, regrouping animals into bioclimatic zones rather than by geographic criteria or species, and in establishing a new animal behavior show.

Indeed, there is not a single major zoo in the United States that does not have plans for a new and improved animal show or a new and improved animal exhibit.

Robert Wagner, executive director of the American Assn. of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, observed:

“Even while a new zoo is under construction, there will be newer and better techniques being developed. That is good, because that means we never stop progressing.”