Ex-Ranger Takes In Orphaned Animals : Wildlife: The native South African established the project in 1973 with savings and sponsorships. Today it includes 70 large enclosures and aviaries.

Foster father Viv Wilson is fond of his orphans even if they do growl and grunt, snarl and snap, hiss and hoot.

One even bit off a finger.

The 58-year-old former game ranger’s charges are lions, hyenas, baboons, crocodiles, snakes and hundreds of birds common to the African bush.

“It’s not a zoo, and it’s not for financial gain,” said Wilson, a native South African who set up the home in 1973.

“It’s simply a private sanctuary for orphaned, abandoned, confiscated or injured wild animals that, reared in captivity, can’t safely be returned to the wilds.”

Chipangali Wildlife Orphanage realizes a dream that Wilson had nurtured since working as a game ranger for the British colonial government in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.

The body of a newborn kudu calf, clubbed to death by a native hunter who also shot its mother, spurred Wilson’s ambition.

He and the hunter met in the brush-studded Chipangali region of eastern Zambia, heavily infested by trypanosomiasis--a disease borne by tsetse files that can be fatal to man and beast.

Wilson recalled asking the hunter why he killed the calf. The hunter replied he was only doing his job, killing animals of some species as part of the government’s anti-tsetse fly operation.

“I knew he was right,” said Wilson. “But I also thought something was awfully wrong.”

When Zambia achieved independence in 1964, Wilson moved to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where he was offered a good job in its game department.

Nine years later, Wilson founded Chipangali, 15 miles south of Zimbabwe’s second city of Bulawayo, with savings and sponsorships.

For Wilson, his wife, Paddy, and their two sons, home was a small thatched roof house and work was tending a few animals in a cluster of pens.

This was the beginning of the seven-year war waged by guerrillas against white supremacy. It ended in 1980 with independence under President Robert Mugabe.

“We weren’t touched by the war, and if guerrillas were roaming around here, I never saw them,” said Wilson. “But we did get quite a few soldiers popping in to drop off pets, mainly monkeys, they’d tired of.”

People continue to deliver animals to Wilson’s care. Today, Chipangali is a honeycomb of more than 70 large enclosures and aviaries for “The Orphans of the Wild,” the title of a book by Wilson published in 1977.

A labyrinth of pebbled paths bordered by gardens of native trees, plants and cactuses lead visitors to Wilson’s waifs.

“We’ve strived to make the setting as naturally African as we can, both for the animals and for people who come to see them,” Wilson said.

His family still lives beneath the thatch-roofed house flanked by enclosures for lions, leopards and monkeys.

About 20,000 people stroll around Chipangali’s 10 acres each year, a third of them schoolchildren who are allowed to visit free. Adults pay the equivalent of $2.

“We encourage the kids,” said Wilson, who serves as manager for a trust fund set up to bankroll the orphanage. “Africans brought up in the rural areas fully understand wildlife because it’s all around them. But millions of Africans born in cities and towns have never seen a lion, a leopard or a snake.”

Urban children, he said, “have lost contact with nature. Here, we take them back to the wild.”

The $10,000 needed monthly for Chipangali’s upkeep comes from gate receipts, sales of a wildlife calendar, the orphanage’s restaurant and fund-raising events such as horse racing.

Scores of sponsors, many of them foreigners, adopt animals and send checks as foster parents.

“We still battle,” said Wilson, who launched Chipangali on $400 a month. “We can never close, so we must cut our cloth to suit our income.”

Wilson, who as a game ranger survived charges by rhinoceros and bites from poisonous snakes, has had few problems from his creatures.

A lion chomped off one of his fingers, a visiting schoolboy was slightly injured by a leopard and some of his 40 employees have been bitten by monkeys.

Besides running the orphanage, Wilson has written three wildlife books, helped produce a 25-episode program for television and written about 60 research papers on African snakes, animals and birds.

He was commissioned by the Geneva-based International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources to study ways to prevent the extinction of the Jentink’s duiker antelope of Liberia, and won the 1987 Rolex Spirit of Enterprise award for his work there.

In June, he was among 500 people worldwide honored by the United Nations for environmental achievements.

Wilson left Liberia in March just before the outbreak of civil war. He fears the few surviving duiker were destroyed in the conflict.

“That’s my next concern,’ ‘ he said. “As soon as things are settled down I’ll go back to see for myself.”