This is a tale of summer mists, dropped pants, screaming chimps and more. Of a man who takes llamas to breakfast with him. A walk on the wild side, no less. The stuff zoo curators guffaw over when they trade war stories.
With summertime a prime time for visiting the zoos, we asked South Florida zoo keepers to share their stories.
The message, as you will come to see, is this: The monkey in the zoo may not be the primate in the cage.
— Invite Robert Callahan to breakfast and Lord only knows what will show up with him.
Some years ago, while working at the Philadelphia Zoo, Callahan was asked to speak at a breakfast meeting at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel. He arrived with a llama on a leash and a bird in a cage.
He walked through the lobby to the elevator. “I placed the llama in the elevator, hit the express button for the top floor.”He then stepped out to retrieve the bird cage, and when he turned around, the elevator and llama were gone.
By the time Callahan caught up with the llama, the haughty solo traveler already had beguiled press and guests. Callahan’s speaking engagement was indeed a success.
It was at the petting zoo in Philadelphia that a visitor – actually a guest at a sponsors’ dinner that evening – found her hemline suddenly raised.
“The signs should have warned her,” says Callahan, now director of the Dreher Park Zoo, West Palm Beach.
Goats eat anything, the signs noted. Or something to that effect.
As the woman’s child petted the sheep, the goats came up behind her and began to graze on the bottom of her designer dress.
“When she tried to shoo them away, they almost took the dress with them.
“Luckily,” Callahan says, “she didn’t ask to be reimbursed.”
And then there was the less-than-lively skunk Callahan took – along with five or six other animals – to a grade school one day.
Callahan placed the carrying case on a table on the stage, and, throwing out clues, asked the audience to guess the identity of the mysterious creature inside. The answer came roaring back. Skunk. Skunk. Skunk.
For the slightest fraction of a minute, Callahan froze as he reached inside the carrying case. The fuzzy little fellow was suddenly demised. “I was sweating bullets,” he says. “I couldn’t tell these first and second graders that the poor skunk was dead. They’d have been traumatized.”
Instead, he casually placed the body on the table, stroked it, petted it, talked about it, then quickly returned it to the case. The show went on.
— Terry Wolf, wildlife director at Lion Country Safari in West Palm Beach, says, “I work with chimps quite a lot and they’ve made a fool out of me more than once.”
The most embarrassing incident was when two female chimps ganged up on Wolf and pulled his pants to the ground. “I tried to pull them back up but the chimps wouldn’t let me,” he says. It was quite a show for park visitors lining the drive-through road. Wolf finally broke free and sprinted to safety, hoisting his pants as he fled.
Then there was Bashful, who kept mysteriously popping up on a chimp island to which he was not assigned.
Now chimps, Wolf explains, cannot swim. Each night before the park shut down, the staff would check on Bashful. And always, like a good kid, he was coolly hanging in his own ‘hood. Next morning, though, there he was – on the neighboring island. And later in the day, he’d be back home. The staff was profoundly perplexed.
Then one day a staffer spotted Bashful with a log under an arm like a water wing, paddling himself between the two islands.
Chimps, however, are not the only zoo inhabitants to outsmart Wolf. He knew before he arrived at the Loxahatchee wildlife park that lions, typical of male cats, spray mark their territory. What he didn’t know was “they particularly like to mark new zoo keepers.”
They’re not coy about it either.
“They walk toward you, turn around and fire,” he says. “With a 500-pound animal, it’s quite some spray. You can smell pretty awesome for the rest of the day.”
And cats are not the only beasties to engage in the scent mark ritual. Ron Magill, of Metro Zoo in Miami, witnessed an embarrassing incident at his park not long ago. “We have a Malaysian tapir. He looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book with a big piglike body and a prehensile snout,” he says.
When this husky fellow waxes territorial, he “urinates backwards, in sequential, high-powered squirts.”What shoots, far and wide, is not a stream, but a very fine drenching mist.
Those clued in to tapir behavior can run for cover before the misting commences. “You can tell when he’s about to do it,” Magill says. “He’ll basically back up to an area and start kicking up his back legs.”
One day a group of seniors, gathered around the tapir pen, oohed and awed with delight as the male approached them. He turned. He shuffled. The next thing you knew it was eau de tapir time.
“There was a delayed reaction,” Magill says. And then an oh-my-God gasp as the olfactories kicked in.
Animals just do the darnedest things. Sometimes zoo workers find themselves in potentially dangerous situations that have a comic twist.
Magill still recalls 15 years ago when a tranquilized chimp sent him running for his life.
The chimp, a large male named Colonel, had somehow cut his arm severely enough to need medical attention.
The vet darted Colonel with a drug called ketamine, which, Magill says, “tends to have hallucinogenic effects on apes.”
They then carted Colonel to the clinic, spread him on the floor, and the doc, kneeling between the chimp’s spread-eagle legs, went to work on the wound.
Magill and another worker were holding the ape’s arms, when all of a sudden, ‘this chimp did a sit-up and put his face in front of the vet’s and let out a blood-curdling scream. We ran for our lives,” Magill says.
Well, he and the assistant did. The vet hardly flinched. Within moments, the chimp’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he was down again. The vet calmly continued the suturing.
“It’s a hallucinogen,” he told the others as they gingerly crept back into the room. “It happens all the time.”
The vet, Gordon Hubbell, was a legend, Magill says. “He was renown for using the perfect [tranquilizing) dosage.”
It was like clockwork. The moment the medical procedure was completed, the animal was awake and ready to walk away.
So that’s how Magill wound up in a pickup truck with a groggy jaguar whose surgical tail bobbing probably hadn’t put him in the best of moods.
Magill and the vet were returning the cat to its cage at the old Crandon Park Zoo, on Key Biscayne. As the cat opened its eyes and flexed its paws, Magill got jumpy.
“Hey doc, he’s waking up,” Magill shouted to the vet, driving the truck.
“Don’t worry Ron. No problem.”
“Doc, this thing’s moving, he’s lifting up his head.”
“Everything’s fine, Ron. Relax.”
Magill knew he was going to die in the back of a beat-up pickup, the victim of a drugged jaguar.
“We barely got the cat through the door of the cage when he got up on his feet,” Magill says.
“Now that,” the vet said, “is a perfect dose.”
