One day shortly after the opening of the Great Ape House at Lincoln Park Zoo, I was standing in a group of about 15 people outside the glassed-in cage that was home to a family of gorillas. Things were quiet in the cage. Some of the animals were sleeping; others just sat.
To me, the appeal of a visit to the zoo lies in the possibility of moments like that. I will never be able to study gorillas like Dian Fossey did; with a daughter nearing college age, a mortgage, and a travel wish list that gets longer every year, I will probably never even have the tourist version of her experience. But the zoo allows me a different kind of entrance into the gorilla’s world.
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Consider the story I used to open this column. In the old preconservation days, the days when Bushman, the Lincoln Park Zoo’s big gorilla, was more famous than the mayor and probably smarter, we came to the zoo to see animals locked in cells. Bushman lived behind heavy iron bars. A sheet of plate glass in front of the bars served as a further shield between us and him. The glass was needed because the higher primates often threw things–like their own feces–at the spectators.
The important point here is that good conservation makes for good displays. Animals thrive–and breed–when they can behave as closely as possible to the way they do in the wild. And animals displaying the full range of their natural behavior are much more interesting to look at than the forlorn inmates of sterile cell blocks.
Sometimes we brought iguanas or turtles, but our most popular reptile was the boa constrictor. Teachers often have to struggle to hold the attention of energetic ten-year-olds, but a docent with a five-foot snake draped across his shoulders has no such problem. My favorite bird for these trips was the barn owl. Our owls were outfitted with jesses, the leather straps that falconers attach to the feet of their birds, so that they could perch comfortably on our hands.
