The Birds and the Bees of Jungle Love

Josh Woolley and Courtney Wusthoff were at the San Francisco Zoo for one reason Saturday: sex. And they would not go home disappointed.

Now in its 13th year, the zoo’s annual series of adults-only sex tours is a perpetual Valentine’s Day sellout. The $50 tour includes a narrated trolley car ride through the zoo, a short presentation on sexual evolution, and a pet-the-animals reception complete with champagne and chocolate and Frank Sinatra tunes.

“I talk dirty to perfect strangers,” said tour guide Jane Tollini by way of introduction. “And you are some kinky, abhorrent devils that would come out here at 9 a.m. on a Saturday for this.”

Visitors don’t actually get to see zoo animals doing the deed. But they hear about it in exquisite detail, thanks to Tollini, the zoo’s penguin keeper and founder of the tours.

Tollini, a grandmother and 20-year zoo veteran, offers an enthusiastic narrative on the mating habits and sexual talents of each species:

River otters mate in a graceful water ballet, while chimpanzees get together for days and days of sex. Zebras don’t have time for anything but a quickie lest they fall prey to hyenas. Lions can do it 50 times in 24 hours. Koalas only do it for 40 seconds at a time, just three times a year.

And eagles mate midair, plummeting toward the earth. They separate just moments before hitting the ground.

“I love animal sex trivia, and even I learned something,” said Woolley, a graduate student in neuroscience at UC San Francisco. The tour was a Valentine’s Day surprise from Wusthoff, a fellow medical student.

Jim and Linda Celrod of Danville, Calif., took the tour last year. This year they brought along a video camera and their neighbors, Kathy and Bob Kindred.

“Like anything else, it’s all in the presentation,” Jim Celrod said about Tollini. “She’s a hoot.”

As the trolley winds its way among the zoo’s exhibits, another zoo staffer in a golf cart leads the way, warning parents with small children along the path that what’s about to come over the loudspeaker might not be for them.

Rolly, the pygmy hippo, couldn’t seem to get his groove on with female pen mate Polly for 20 years. When Polly finally died--”from sheer frustration,” Tollini said--Rolly got a new companion named Agnes. Now he never misses an opportunity.

The orangutans in the zoo are given birth control pills, just like humans. And apes can mate swinging from the trees, which Tollini advises her audience not to attempt on their own.

Karl Zakalik and Susan Malinowski, both physicians visiting from Detroit, wondered aloud whether such a tour would go over well at the zoo back home.

“We laughed the whole way,” said Malinowski, who found out about the tour over the Internet.

“It wasn’t romantic,” said Kristin Lang, a Web developer from San Francisco. “But it was funny and lewd in a very San Francisco way.”