SO LONG, PHOENIX
Red panda will depart city soon for new zoo
Phoenix the red panda is saying goodbye to Saskatoon’s Forestry Farm and Zoo.
The bandit-faced critter’s last day on display will be Oct. 1.
Saskatoon Zoo manager Tim Sinclair-Smith won’t say exactly where Phoenix is headed — he doesn’t want to pre-empt the announcement coming soon from the red panda’s new home — but says the raccoon-like mammal will end up at another accredited Canadian zoo.
Phoenix was two years old when he came to Saskatoon from Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Zoo in early 2014. At the time, then-zoo manager John Moran said he hoped Phoenix would become a permanent fixture of the zoo and that a mate would eventually join him.
However, Phoenix’s love life was nonexistent during his time in the Bridge City, despite Moran’s best efforts to bring in a female red panda. And now the minds behind the Species Survival Plan, which aims to ensure survival of certain species in zoos and aquariums, have decreed that Phoenix will be of greater benefit to his species elsewhere. Sinclair-Smith doesn’t know if the red panda will find a mate at his new home, but says he hopes so.
The zoo manager said another factor in the decision not to keep Phoenix in Saskatoon was that the Forestry Farm and Zoo needs to “take three steps backwards to go 10 steps forward” in order to become a world-class facility.
He said the zoo needs to focus on the animals it has before branching into bringing in new species.
“How much money are we willing to invest into one particular animal when we have a bunch of other species and native species here being housed at the facility that also need their housing issues seriously addressed?” SinclairSmith said.
“People will see animals leaving — and you will see more until we get to where we need to get to. I’m going to be honest about that and I’m not going to apologize for it.”
The Komodo dragons, which came to the zoo this spring on a one-year lease from the Calgary Zoo, are a notable exception to this mandate. Sinclair-Smith said bringing these large reptiles to Saskatoon was a “strategic move” to boost admission numbers.
“We’ve been able to raise far more revenue than we have in any other year and we’re headed for a record-breaking year revenue wise,” he said. “These type of strategic moves — it may not always fit in with focusing on the species here, but we are. We’re focusing on the species here because we’re driving more revenue so we can address a lot of these issues.”
Once Phoenix leaves, the zoo’s aging wolves will be moved into his enclosure, which is more than twice the size of their existing pen.
Sinclair-Smith said the wolves’ current home is “unacceptable on many fronts” and, while their new pen will still not be as large as it should be, it will be “quite the step up” for them.
The badger, which is currently kept in a “very, very small little space,” will move to the wolves’ old home and other species will be shuffled into bigger and newer enclosures. “As you can see, it allows us to start addressing several welfare issues by just having one animal leave,” Sinclair-Smith said.
Phoenix has been one of the most public faces of the zoo for the last three years, appearing frequently on billboards and other advertisements for the facility. SinclairSmith said the new stars will be grizzly bears Mistaya and Koda.
Sinclair-Smith has been steadily shifting focus to the bears in the year that he has been at the helm of the Forestry Farm and Zoo. Last December, he helped the 11-yearold animals hibernate for the first time and said the public will eventually be able to watch their hibernation through a web camera feed.
This summer, the zoo partnered with an Alberta research program to do conservation research on the animals. There are also plans underway to build Mistaya and Koda a larger and more naturalistic habitat.
“We’ve never placed enough spotlight on the two bears,” Sinclair-Smith said. “Grizzly bears are magnificent animals and, for me, the highlight of this facility is definitely the grizzly bears and they ’re definitely our key species.”