Now came days of jubilation, months of fiscal glory. A summer of splendor at the ticket windows, of overflowing revenue streams and vaulting growth projections, all fueled by the legions of tots, sun-scorched but happy as they waved at their new best friends, Mr. Warthog and Mr. Giraffe. With the blockbuster opening of Safari Africa, 2004 reigned as the most luminous year in Lowry Park’s history.
The news of Ellie’s pregnancy only fueled expectations. The nineteen-year-old elephant wasn’t due until late 2005. But if she successfully delivered, her baby would draw even more visitors and confirm that Lowry Park could breed its fledgling herd. A calf would solidify Ellie’s standing as the matriarch. Brian French and Steve Lefave were increasing Ellie’s vitamins and exercising her in the yards and in the pool. They were also brainstorming ways to avert catastrophe during the birth. Calves born in captivity are sometimes stillborn or die within the first twenty-four hours. The mother elephant, usually a first-time mother, can get confused and attack the newborn. Isolated from her species for most of her life, Ellie’s inexperience was especially profound. She had never given birth or witnessed another female elephant delivering. She had never even seen a calf.
Somehow, the humans would have to coach her. They had to prepare Ellie for when the contractions traveled through her and then a strange, squirming creature dropped from her womb.
As if to confirm Lowry Park’s new prominence, the zoo was invited that December to show off its animals on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Jeff Ewelt and Melinda Mendolusky, the birds-of-prey keepers who led the daily animal shows, were the obvious choices to ferry a sampling of creatures to New York.
They left a couple of days before the show—Jeff and Melinda and their spouses in a van and a truck hooked to a trailer. Since they didn’t know which animals Conan would pick to appear on camera, they brought a bounty: a black-headed python, a chinchilla, two New Guinea singing dogs, cave-dwelling spiders from Tanzania, plus Smedley the vulture and Ivan the Eurasian eagle owl. Finally, there was Jeff and Melinda’s new favorite, Arnold the show-stealing pig. If a pig could be a mutt, Arnold qualified. He was a mixed breed, only three years old, six hundred pounds and counting. He had been someone’s pet, but then he grew so massive that his owner donated him to the zoo. Jeff and Melinda had cast him for the grand finale of their birds-of-prey show. The audience cheered when he lumbered into view. Now he dozed in the back of the trailer, ensconced in hay, bound for stardom. The zoo had even brought him a little blanket to wear while on the air. One side was emblazoned with lowry park zoo, tampa bay. The other declared i ♥ ny.
The journey northward played like a hybrid of The Odyssey and Wild Kingdom, with a dash of Green Acres. They drove for two days and most of two nights and got caught in traffic near Savannah and in an ice storm in the Carolinas. When they reached a fresh snowfall outside Rocky Mount, they pulled to the side of the highway and let the singing dogs out to relieve themselves. The dogs, who had never seen snow before, were mystified at first but soon jumped and rolled in the powder, their breath making tiny clouds.
The night before the show, they checked into a Best Western in Hackensack and snuck the menagerie into their rooms. The singing dogs, a nocturnal species, romped through the night in one room with Jeff and his wife; Ivan the eagle owl perched at the foot of Melinda’s bed. Arnold was too big to bring inside so they piled more hay around him in the van and wrapped him in a comforter.
The next morning, December 28, they ventured into the jungle of Manhattan, shrouded in blackened icicles and toxic slush and a bone-deep chill. Unbeknownst to the animals, they were headed into one of the cradles of modern civilization—a towering stone temple dedicated to human ambition and pride and the sacrament of the profit motive: Rockefeller Center. Once they found their way to the building and parked in the basement, they ran into an unexpected obstacle. To reach the show’s sixth-floor studio, Arnold had to ride the elevator. To get to the elevator, he had to scale a ramp and then walk down a long concrete corridor, an extremely difficult challenge for a giant pig.
“You ready to walk, Arnold?” said Melinda. “This way, Arnie!”
They pushed him up the ramp and then laid out a long piece of rubber matting so he wouldn’t slip and urged him on with a trail of marshmallows and powdered doughnuts. The pig hesitated, squealed, tried to turn around. The quest to reach the elevator exhausted him. A crowd gathered just in time to see him evacuate his massive bowels.
“He does what he wants, huh?” said a bystander, backing away from the smell. Jeff and Melinda and their spouses quickly cleaned the mess, then Arnold resumed his slow march, walking in tiny steps like a woman in a tight skirt.
Onto the elevator and up to the sixth floor they rode. Finally they established a base camp on the linoleum floor of the studio’s hallway. As extras and crew members hurried back and forth, they all stopped at the sight of Arnold, stretched out in a fresh new bed of hay.
“Wow.”
“He’s like Jabba the Hutt!”
Nearly everyone was sucked into Arnold’s mighty gravitational field. A pneumatic blonde, wearing jeans so tight they could cause gangrene, flirted with him. Max Weinberg, the drummer who led Conan’s house band when not on tour with Bruce Springsteen, knew a star when he saw one and stopped to give the pig his regards. Weinberg, a gentleman, made no jokes about bacon, as so many others did. The only person who did not betray the slightest reaction to Arnold’s presence was the show’s famous host. A thin and almost spectral figure, Conan passed several times without even glancing at the pig sprawled two feet away. The network icon appeared lost inside some preshow fugue state, avoiding eye contact and conversation with everyone in the crowded hallway until he sighted the blonde. Immediately he stopped to chat her up. The prerogative of the alpha, flaunted once again.
The rest of the day zipped by. At rehearsal, the animals were brought onto the set to audition for Conan’s consideration. Almost immediately the singing dogs and the vulture were rejected. The others were in, time permitting; Arnold was deemed so spectacular that the show’s staff wanted to bring him on last for the segment’s climax. To Jeff’s and Melinda’s dismay, someone suggested that perhaps Conan should ride on Arnold’s back during the show. Luckily, the host declined.
“I’m good, thanks.”
At showtime, Conan made his entrance to raucous hoots and hollers. Suddenly, the gaunt shadow of the hallway was gone, transformed into another man so electric, he seemed to light the studio on his own. During his monologue, he told the audience that he had some unusual guests waiting backstage.
“There are animals,” he said. “They are dangerous. We could all be killed.”
More laughter. More approval.
When Jeff and Melinda brought out Lowry Park’s animals, Conan knew what to do. He draped the python around his neck and let one of the cave-dwelling spiders crawl up his chest and onto his wrist.
“It’s taking my pulse,” said Conan.
Through a fortuitous accident, Ivan the eagle owl stole the night. Ivan was supposed to fly from Jeff’s wife to Conan—they’d practiced it that afternoon—but the mouse tidbit in Conan’s glove fell out, and so Ivan ignored the command. Instead he spread his great wings and circled back over the heads of the audience to rapturous applause. Through it all, Arnold bided his time, in position behind the curtain as he waited to deliver the segment’s big finale. But before his moment came, time ran out, and the show went to commercial.
Just like that, it was over. Arnold had traveled the length of the country, shivered through a cold night in New Jersey, and been hauled into a metropolis of honking cabs and strange subterranean smells—the last place on Earth designed for a pig. He had struggled to find his way down a long and perilous hallway, so slippery it made him squeal, endured the condescension of the glitterati, and then been led in and out of a cavernous space that boomed with the roar of humans and burned with the glare of who knows how many tiny suns—all for nothing. In the end, he had been upstaged by an owl.
“Poor Arnold,” someone said.
With Melinda and Jeff leading him on a leash, he slowly made his way back to the elevator. By now it was late and the pig was growing restless and cranky. Back in the studio, just before the show ended, someone prevailed upon Conan to give Arnold another chance. A remote camera crew caught up with him in the basement, deep into his plodding retreat.
This was the chance the pig and his handlers had labored toward for so long. At last, Arnold’s wet and whiskered snout would appear on national TV and the zoo would cap another triumph. When the show aired after midnight, more than two million Americans would watch Conan’s antics with the owl and the chinchilla and the spiders. For many in that vast audience, it would be the first time they had ever heard of Lowry Park. As the remote crew zoomed in, Arnold kept walking in his same short, halting steps away from the camera and the lights, toward the refuge of the trailer. He didn’t care about the Nielsens. He just wanted another doughnut.
A second jungle, two thousand miles to the south. Marmosets chirped in the trees. Leaf-cutter ants marched through the underbrush in a winding column.
Dustin Smith was hiking through a tropical forest in central Panama, joining a team of researchers made up of biologists and other herps keepers from other American zoos. They had come to the forest in search of a vanishing species: the Panamanian golden frog. On a cool Tuesday morning in January 2005, Dustin and the others walked in single file, keeping an eye out for boa constrictors. A day or so earlier, in another part of the forest, they had found a fer-de-lance, a deadly viper. Now they climbed a hill scarred with lava flow from an old volcanic eruption, then negotiated their way down the other side, toward a gorge with a rushing stream—one of the last breeding grounds of the golden frog.
Of all the amphibians plunging toward extinction, the golden frog was among the most beautiful. With its bright yellow skin, dotted with deep black chevrons, it had long been Panama’s national symbol. The frog was believed to bring good luck; images of it hung on walls in restaurants. In gift shops, the shelves were crowded with tiny golden replicas. The souvenirs far outnumbered the real thing. As the Panamanian countryside had been paved over by developers, a lethal fungus known as chytrid had spread through the streams and rivers. The golden-frog population had been nearly wiped out. Less than two thousand remained in the wild.
“They’ll be extinct probably in five years,” said Kevin Zippel, the biologist who headed this project. “I don’t think there’s anything anybody can do to stop that.”
In recent years, Kevin and other researchers had gathered small numbers of golden frogs and sent them to zoos and aquariums around the United States. Some would soon be arriving at Lowry Park. Eventually, if a defense against the fungus could be found, biologists hoped to reintroduce golden frogs back into the forest, provided there was any forest left. The odds were not good. Once these last holdouts in Panama died off, the species was almost certainly fated to live out its time on Earth inside tiny rooms at zoos and aquariums.
“Is that right?” Kevin said. “I don’t know.”
Around the planet, so many amphibian species were headed toward extinction that there was no way to preserve a genetic sampling of them all through captivity. Researchers could not get to them in the wild quickly enough. Even if they could, zoos didn’t have room for all the species, leaving Kevin and others to play God. Somehow, they had to decide which amphibian species would be saved and which would be allowed to vanish.
“Is that right?” Kevin said again. “I don’t know.”
The golden frog had been selected for survival in captivity. Kevin and Dustin and the rest of this team had come to Panama to chronicle the frogs’ last stand. They wanted to see how many were still hanging on. If they found any, they would take skin swabs to determine if the frogs were infected with chytrid. In their first two weeks in the forest, the team had encountered a breathtaking array of wildlife—toucans and peccaries and caimans, acacia ants and scorpions, a green parrot snake and a three-toed sloth, a porcupine, even some basilisks, better known as Jesus lizards for their ability to skitter across the top of water. One day, some of the leaf-cutter ants found their way into Kevin’s backpack and sliced through his shirt and pants and a belt. But Dustin and the others had found almost no golden frogs.
On this particular morning, they were hopeful. The stream waiting at the bottom of the gorge had historically been one of the best places to find golden frogs. The team called it the Thousand-Frog Stream because in previous years, when the goldens were breeding, the banks were so thick with them that it was hard to step anywhere without risking an awful squish. This morning as the researchers returned to the stream, there was no carpet of gold. Searching under leaves and in the crevices of the stones, they found only a handful of frogs.
Dustin saw one on the side of a mossy rock, then grabbed it. “This is definitely a female,” he said, pointing to the frog’s feet. She didn’t have any pads on the sides of her thumbs. “Nuptial pads,” they’re called, and only the males have them. They’re used to grip the female during breeding. Sometimes the male hangs on for weeks or even longer, waiting for her to lay her eggs so he can be the one to fertilize them. Cupped in Dustin’s hands, the female appeared tiny. Someone brought Q-tips to swab her. The samples were secured inside a tiny bottle, and then Dustin let her go.
This site, with the stream rushing over the rocks along the high walls of the gorge, seemed so idyllic, so complete in its hushed perfection, that it felt like an ecstatic vision. Shafts of sunshine, piercing the canopy, fell on the water like light through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral. Vines hung everywhere, bursting with purple orchids. Spiderwebs glistened. A morpho butterfly appeared over the stream. As it fluttered into one of the shafts of light from above, its wings erupted with a metallic, iridescent blue. For a few moments, as the morpho moved from light to shadow and then back into light, the brilliant color flashed on, then off, then on again.
For all the beauty of this place, the researchers were struck by how empty it felt. Dustin, normally joking and talking nonstop, stood at the edge of the stream, wrapped in solitude.
Almost all of the frogs were gone. Erased, seemingly overnight. Nothing would bring them back.
A moment of silence, then an observation.
It had only been a couple of weeks since Lowry Park sent Jeff and Melinda to Manhattan with Arnold and the other animals. Now the same institution had helped send Dustin to the wilds of Central America on behalf of a critically endangered species. In the arc between these two trips, Lowry Park revealed the spectrum of its ambitions—and the difficulty of knowing exactly what to make of those ambitions. The appearance on the Conan O’Brien show might have seemed nothing more than a publicity stunt. But Jeff and Melinda saw it as an unprecedented opportunity for Lowry Park to help millions of Americans connect with wildlife. Jeff pointed to the moment when Ivan the eagle owl took off and spread his wings in front of the camera. Ivan’s impromptu flight, Jeff noted, was probably the first time many watching at home had ever seen an eagle owl flying or had even heard of such a bird.
“To see an owl fly around like an owl should fly—that’s huge,” Jeff said afterward. “There is entertainment value there. There has to be.”
The Panama trip was not so easily judged either. What appeared to have been an altruistic act by the zoo was not that simple. Lowry Park did support the trip, but not nearly as much as it might have. The zoo’s conservation fund donated about $750—enough to cover Dustin’s plane ticket and expenses. But his request to use work days had been denied. Dustin had to devote almost three weeks of his vacation time, nearly his entire allotment for the year, to join the research team in Panama. In the end, it had been Dustin’s dedication to the golden frogs, not the zoo’s, that made his trip possible. Did that mean Lowry Park didn’t care? Hardly. Dustin himself acknowledged the zoo’s ongoing support of endangered amphibians. That was why the herps staff worked with the poison-dart frogs; it was why the zoo was bringing in some of the golden frogs. In recent years, Lowry Park’s conservation fund had donated more than $3,000 toward efforts to save the golden frogs.
Lex would have said that an appearance on national TV—and any resulting bump in profits—was precisely what made it possible for the nonprofit to fight for the survival of the frogs and other endangered species. The reverse could be argued as well. Critics often said that such conservation efforts were token gestures, designed to legitimize the larger exploitation that zoos perpetrate every day on countless other species in the name of entertaining the masses.
Considered together, the two trips were just another reminder of how at Lowry Park, as at any zoo, the motivation behind every act was open to question. Every decision invited suspicion. Every claim required inspection.
The phone lines kept repeating the mantra: “Thank you for calling Lowry Park Zoo, voted the number-one zoo in America for families.”
Lex’s vision was materializing. The zoo was winning accolades, drawing bigger crowds, growing almost by the day. A year after the grand opening, Safari Africa was already completing phase two of the expansion, with new exhibits featuring white rhinos and meerkats. A skyride was installed, offering aerial tours. Soon, Ellie would deliver the first calf of what Lex hoped would be many born into the new herd. He frequently checked on Ellie, whose due date was still months away. He and Brian French were disagreeing these days about how to handle Ellie’s delivery and what to do with the calf. Brian believed it would be essential to relax the rules of protected contact and allow him into Ellie’s enclosure to help her with the delivery and to decrease the chances that she would kill her newborn calf. Lex agreed, but it was clear that their differing views on elephant care were not about to go away. Brian was already lobbying to train the baby elephant with free contact, to encourage the bond between the calf and its keepers. Lex preferred to focus on the bond between the calf and the other elephants. As much as possible, he wanted Lowry Park’s herd to live like the herds in Africa. He kept touting his game park plan, describing it as the real future of Lowry Park. The man always had his eye on the next big thing. He breathed ambition.
The never-ending drive to the top was wearing thin among some of the staff. A few keepers still had mixed feelings about the decision to bring over the wild elephants. They’d seen for themselves that the four Swazi elephants appeared to be doing well, and they respected the way Brian French and his staff had worked to help the herd adjust. Even so, Lex’s big push had left some wondering, more than ever, about the zoo’s priorities and direction. One of the doubters was Carie Peterson. For years, she had been relatively happy working at Lowry Park despite the low pay. By early 2005, though, a growing number of things troubled her. Lowry Park was a nonprofit, but to her it felt as though the place was increasingly being run like a business. She worried that the staff was already overworked and was asked to do too much with too little. Carie didn’t understand how Lowry Park could afford the elephants and the other new animals, when as far as she could tell, the budget was already stretched to the limit. If the zoo could find millions of dollars to build a state-of-the-art elephant building, why couldn’t it spare a couple thousand to splash some new paint on the walls or fix the damaged doors in the night houses of her department?
Carie tried to be patient. She had voiced her concerns and hoped the problems would soon be addressed. She couldn’t imagine walking away from the animals, especially Enshalla. When the tiger finally got pregnant and delivered her first litter, Carie wanted to be there. For Enshalla, she would stay a little longer.
In the elephant building, Lamaze class was under way. Brian French and the rest of his staff had begun to prepare Ellie for labor and delivery. They were teaching her to lower her body by spreading her back legs and bracing them, so that when the baby arrived, it would have a shorter drop to the hard floor. If Ellie stayed in the wide stance, there was also less chance she’d step on the calf when it emerged. With the permission of his supervisors, Brian had begun briefly tethering Ellie’s legs—sometimes one, sometimes two—with nylon straps to the bars of her stall. Brian and Steve tethered her before they went into her stall. They wanted Ellie to grow accustomed to the tethers, so that if necessary the staff could restrict her movement during the delivery, offering some safety to both the calf and the humans who would approach to help.
That fall, as Ellie’s pregnancy entered its final months, Brian and Steve worked with her every day, practicing the bracing position, teaching her to shift her front legs so the baby could nurse. Brian had wired the night-vision cameras in the barn so that he and the other keepers could call up the video feeds on their computers at home. As the delivery date drew closer, the staff took turns checking the feeds. If Ellie went into labor at night, they wanted to get back to the zoo as soon as possible.
One night in mid-October, it was Brian’s turn to take the three-a.m. check. He signed on to his computer at home, scanned the feeds from the night-vision cameras at the zoo, saw that Ellie was doing fine, then went back to sleep. An hour or so later, he was awakened by another keeper calling to tell him that the camera feeds weren’t coming up on his computer. Apparently the server had crashed. Brian wasn’t worried; Ellie was still a month away from her due date. Besides, he and Steve were scheduled to be back at the zoo before dawn.
At 5:45 a.m., when Brian arrived, he heard an unusual sound from inside the elephant building. A bucket being kicked, maybe. Had someone left it in one of the stalls? He walked into the building and through the kitchen toward the double doors that led into the darkened barn. When he pushed open the doors, a newborn calf ran forward, straight into Brian’s leg. It was a male, still bloody, weighing maybe two hundred pounds. Brian’s brain raced to catch up. Ellie was still in the barn. Somehow she had given birth on her own. It had to have happened in the past hour, just after the server went down.
The calf was excited and wanted to move. Brian wrapped his arms around him and held him steady. The floor of the kitchen was slick, and if the calf fell or crashed into something, he could hurt himself. Brian looked him over and made sure he wasn’t already injured. He stuck his hand into the calf’s mouth to see if his airway was clear and pulled out some placenta. He wanted to check on Ellie, but he had to wait until someone else arrived to watch over the calf. Another keeper, someone who worked with the zebras and giraffes, walked in at that moment and found Brian and the calf, locked in their slippery union.
“Oh,” the other keeper said. “An elephant.”
“Yeah,” said Brian. “C’mere and hold him a minute.”
He ran out to his car, grabbed his cell phone, called Steve. “We have a little bit of a surprise.”
The calf was blue and wet and wobbly on his feet. His head was still cone-shaped from being squeezed through his mother’s birth canal. His eyes were wide, the black pupils lined with red. His ears appeared pink from the blood vessels under the skin. The umbilical cord had already been severed, but what remained—a short tube—dangled from his belly.
How had his mother delivered the calf on her own? Had she remembered the Lamaze exercises the humans taught her? How had she reacted when she first saw the calf? Brian and Steve and the other keepers had no idea. The only witnesses had been the other elephants, who watched the calf take his first steps before dawn. Lex, who soon arrived to check on the new addition, called it “the virgin birth.”
Once the calf was born, he had been small enough to wander between the bars of the stalls. Lex and Brian knew they were fortunate that those first minutes had not careened into disaster. Ellie might have stepped on her baby, or the calf could have roamed into a stall with one of the other elephants and been stomped or kicked and possibly killed. Instead he had found his way into the arms of his human keepers.
The staff moved quickly. Dr. Murphy was summoned. Ellie, in her stall, appeared to have recovered from the delivery, but was obviously unnerved. When Brian and Steve brought the calf back into the barn, Ellie kept her distance. Her ears were pushed out, and she would not look at the baby. She had no idea what to make of him and wanted nothing to do with him. Overcoming her rejection, and soon, was crucial. Already the calf was trumpeting with hunger. If the keepers couldn’t get Ellie to let her baby close enough to nurse, the chances were they’d never bond. Brian and Steve moved Ellie to a clean stall and tethered her. They wrapped a harness around the calf’s torso and attached it to another strap, so they could pull him back to safety if Ellie became aggressive. Then they slowly led the newborn closer to his mother.
“It’s OK,” Brian told Ellie. “It’s all right.”
She was not convinced. Her eyes were wide. When the calf drew near, she tried to shoo him away with her trunk.
“OK, Ellie, hold still,” said Brian. “Steady. It’s not going to hurt you.”
With the human’s encouragement, the elephant began to calm down and stopped trying to push the calf away. She reached out with her trunk, touched him briefly, then pulled the trunk away. Brian stood next to her and let her feel his hand on her skin again.
“Brace,” he told Ellie, and she obeyed, moving a front leg forward so the calf could nurse. Before the keepers let him get that close, Brian reached under Ellie and massaged one of her nipples to get the first few drops of milk. Soon the calf was underneath her. He was too short to reach his mother, so the keepers gave him a little platform, only a few inches high, to stand on. After several tries, he latched on, and Ellie visibly relaxed. Her milk was flowing. So were her maternal instincts.
“Good girl,” Brian told her.
Already, Ellie had shown more fortitude than anyone could have asked. Now she gave a hint of what kind of mother she would be. As her newborn finished his first meal and fell asleep, Ellie reached with her trunk toward the hay scattered around the floor and covered the calf with a makeshift blanket. Then she stood over him, watching and waiting until he needed her again. For the moment, the controversy surrounding Lowry Park’s herd had become moot. All the arguments about keeping elephants in captivity temporarily fell away. The baby was here, and would not survive without his mother and human caretakers.
New life insists. It does not debate. It simply appears, trembling and hungry, and will not be denied.