SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
Some zoo animals are doing fine with no visitors, but others seem lost without the crowds
The blue crowned pigeon approaches his mate and begins davening, twerking his tail toward the skylight of the Cape May County Zoo aviary as his beak dips toward earth. When the dance is over the female pigeon turns and begins picking at the ground.
“We’d like them to breed, but they just can’t get it right,” sighs Janeen Moore, a zookeeper charged with caring for these birds, as well as every other winged creature at this zoo at the southernmost tip of New Jersey. The female pigeon had been at the zoo for nearly three years before her “genetically suitable” mate arrived. Though the male has been trying to impress her since 2016, the female pigeon is simply, Moore says, “not feeling it.” The male’s efforts to woo also include repeated attempts to build a nest, but when he summons his mate to inspect his efforts, Moore says, “She comes up and goes, ‘That’s not good enough,’ and throws it all out,” knocking the insufficiently arranged sticks out of the tree and onto the ground. Every egg the dysfunctional coupling has managed to produce was either unfertilized or cracked.
It would seem childishly optimistic to think the pigeon couple might get it right during this particular mating season. But without the peeping eyes of the usual spectators, now could be the perfect time.
The Cape May County Zoo closed in March to ensure the safety of the human public. But the closure keeps its animal inhabitants safe, too.
In April, New York City’s Bronx Zoo found eight of its big cats had contracted the coronavirus from an asymptomatic keeper, and it’s assumed primates also can be infected. That means no annoying people around enclosures.
In Hong Kong, a pair of pandas that had been failing to mate for a decade consummated their union after their zoo shut to the public.
Maybe the blue crowned pigeons will get the chance to relax, make a baby and finally finish that home improvement project.
When I visited the Cape May County Zoo in mid-may, keepers who normally rotate between groups of the more than 600 animals were staying in one section to avoid cross-contamination and were in isolation from other employees.
While the zoo is a public facility that gets a budget from the county government to pay zookeeper salaries, parks director Ed Runyon says the organization runs “almost entirely” on donations from visitors, who pay no entrance fees. In spring, the zoo typically takes in about a quarter of its annual donations, which cover costs such as the staggering $50,000-a-month food bill.
On June 13, zoo director and head veterinarian Hubert (Doc) Paluch enacted his plan to reopen with limited visitors, one-way foot traffic and masks, otherwise risk losing the remaining 75 per cent of its annual donations.
The sudden disappearance of everyone is the biggest change for the animals. That’s just fine by the reptiles, says general curator and supervising animal keeper Kevin Wilson: “They certainly don’t seem to be fazed by the quiet time. I think they like it.”
Wilson says during “the very bad months” of summer, “you’ve got a thousand people in this building,” gesturing around the reptile house.
“They’re all banging on the glass, because the kids want the animals to react. And the more people bang on the glass, the more the animals just hide in the back. And some of them do stress out. They don’t eat.”
Reptiles are heuristic. “Out of the egg and on their own,” Wilson says. It’s not built into them to socialize with each other, much less people.
“Alligators, crocodiles, snakes, everything like that,” Wilson lists, looking down at Ike, an American alligator whose eyes and nostrils are the only body parts that break the meniscus of his pond. Ike silently drifts toward the voice of the man who feeds him but for whom he feels nothing. “It’s not so much they want to be with you. You’re fulfilling a need.”
For some animals, the attachment is more than transactional. Bird keeper Moore introduces me to Gil, a grey cockatoo who became so distressed at his new-found solitude he began self-harming, plucking his chest feathers until he gnawed a hole in his skin that had to be covered with a vest the bird immediately ripped apart.
“They love getting talked to all day,” Moore says, turning her head upside down at a blue parrot named Brat. He is used to Moore’s face, and, like everyone else, hates the masks protecting us; he repeatedly tries to remove Moore’s.
“He just doesn’t think it belongs there,” she says. “You think you’re coming to the zoo to watch the animals. Well, the animals are watching you, too.”
When I laugh at Moore’s words, Brat’s mate, Azur, mimics my peal back at me.
Like the parrots, the zoo’s primates socialize with humans. So do otters and camels and, unlike their reptile brethren, tortoises, which come over to keepers and excitedly play at their feet even when they know no food is forthcoming. They thrill at human contact.
Keepers are filling in the new social gap.
“(The animals) look forward to their company,” Doc says. But, he tells me, “They do miss the crowds and the variety of people coming through.”
After two months of the rapture-like scene at the zoo, even animals generally apathetic to people seem to feel the loss.
“I might have been a little surprised by certain species that may have missed the public more than I thought they would,” Doc says.
“I was walking by the bison,” parks director Runyon says. “Usually they don’t care about anything. But they were all coming right over and just staring at us as we were walking by.”
Later, the female half of a pair of lions comes up to the fence and pushes her haunch against the chain link for a scratch no one is allowed to give her. Based on what we saw from the cats at the Bronx Zoo, if the lioness’s keeper had the coronavirus and the lioness got near enough to her keeper to catch it, the most severe symptom she’d experience is a cough.
“It’s the people that (the virus) is affecting,” says Doc. “It’s not affecting animals to any extent.”
Zoos such as Cape May are increasingly oriented toward welfare, which Doc says has become a “buzzword” in the past decade. Enclosures have become larger and more naturalistic, and animals have more places to secret themselves away from our gaze. They are no longer trained to perform for our enjoyment, but to sit for necessary medical treatment they used to be sedated or restrained to endure.
“It’s a good thing everybody’s going more toward conservation and protect(ion), rather than showing them off,” event and program co-ordinator Jean Whalen says. “But it’s getting out of the entertainment business. That’s making it harder.”
Distance protects humans, too — definitely from getting mauled, but also from the pain of attachment to what never really belonged to us. When I ask why the name of Mr. Bojangles the bobcat is not printed on the information card about his species in front of his enclosure, Whalen says, “The (keepers) don’t really like the public to know their names, because it just gets messy if something happens to that animal, and the (public) keeps expecting it to be that (same) animal. We have to explain how it went back to Kansas because it didn’t belong to us. And we had two (snow leopard) babies that passed. They were healthy, and then a parasite from being outside went to their brain. It was so sad. So it’s tricky: How much do you share with the public? Because they hurt, too.”
One of the last enclosures before the zoo’s exit is the primate habitat. A bonded pair of siamang gibbons come outside to inspect the unfamiliar person standing next to their keeper, Megan Draper. It’s been a long time since they’ve seen a stranger, and the muscular duo swing across branches, patrolling their territory.
After a few minutes, Merlin, the male, stills and begins the ritual he shares with his mate, Leela, every morning around 10:30. The flaccid pouch at his neck swells with song, sharp little honks that sound like didgeridoo notes. At first the performance is a solo. Then Leela starts to harmonize, and the second voice throbs against the first.
The gibbons hang on the net, their bodies overlapping. Against the brightness of the sky, it’s impossible to tell where her dark body stops and his starts.
What’s the point of a song if there’s no one to hear it?
He just doesn’t think (the keeper’s mask) belongs there. You think you’re coming to the zoo to watch the animals. Well, the animals are watching you, too.