Zoo animals don’t seem to mind peace and quiet
Some were spooked by staffers wearing PPE
The Milwaukee County Zoo is like a ghost town since the coronavirus pandemic swept through the planet’s human population.
Some of the animals have noticed.
Maybe the fish don’t notice that sticky fingers are no longer slapping the sides of their aquaria, and the grizzly bear hibernated throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, but the spider monkeys, bonobos and other highly social primates are missing visitors.
Alex, the zoo’s new female orangutan, is loving the peace and quiet, and the red-tailed ratsnakes, who normally spend their days curled up on tree branches, are moving around quite a bit more and peering out their window.
One of the Amur tigers keeps an eye out for the zookeepers who bring food and without the normal crush of people traipsing through the popular big cats area, it’s easier for him to spot his meal ticket each day.
“It’s very quiet, almost a little eerie,” said Kara DeLanty, area supervisor for apes and primates. “We’re used to so
much noise and hustle and bustle. It’s been kind of a different world.”
The Milwaukee County Zoo closed to visitors March 15. Work has continued on the hippos’ new quarters scheduled to open to the public next month, but other than construction workers, staff and animal keepers, the zoo has been bereft of homo sapiens.
No school field trips. No Easter egg hunt. No families spending spring break with the animals. And the annual Mother’s Day free entry for moms has been combined with Father’s Day in June.
“You walk down a sidewalk on a nice sunny day and you see daffodils and other flowers blooming and you think – there’s nobody seeing it,” said Milwaukee County Zoo Director Charles Wikenhauser.
Like stores, museums and other facilities, the zoo is preparing to reopen as soon as it can safely do so.
But the Memorial Day weekend is normally the kickoff to the busy summer season at the zoo.
Zoo staff hopes to be open for this weekend, but the reopening date is still unknown. Preliminary plans call for the zoo to start with allowing just 1,500 to 2,500 people at a time and keeping the buildings closed. That would mean places like the aviary, primates, small mammal, aquatic and reptile and big cats buildings would remain off limits to visitors when the grounds reopen, said Wikenhauser.
The next phase, if all goes well, is to increase the number of visitors to 4,000 to 5,000 by the summer and gradually reopen buildings, monitoring the number of people inside buildings to minimize large groups. The buildings would also undergo deep cleanings.
Zoo admission tickets will only be sold online to visit at a specific time to limit the number of visitors. Zoo members, who get free admission, will also have to go online to reserve timed tickets. The life-size dinosaur exhibit is still scheduled to open for the summer, though it will likely stay until the end of October instead of leaving after Labor Day.
Zoo officials considered lowering ticket prices while parts of the facility are closed to visitors “but we’re so strapped for revenue and to maintain the zoo as best as we can we feel we need to maintain our fees,” said Wikenhauser. “Hopefully the people who come will understand that and hopefully we can try to recover some of the revenue we have lost.”
Most zoo staff have been required to take furloughs, shortening their already hectic work weeks, in many cases, from 40 to 36 hours. The normal seasonal staff of around 100 people, who sell tickets and souvenirs, rent strollers, plant flowers and handle programs at the Northwestern Mutual Family Farm, has not been hired this season.
Zoo a la Carte, the facility’s annual food and music festival in August, was canceled last week.
While the grounds are closed some zookeepers have used the time to renovate animal living areas and perform housekeeping chores like replacing logs in the big cat enclosures. The zoo’s giant Pacific octopus, a female named Egg McMuffin, had a hiding spot in the subflooring of her exhibit. During the shutdown the octopus was moved out and the hole drained so she can’t hide from visitors.
“They can be shy,” said Shawn Miller, curator of Aquarium and Reptiles.
No visitors also means more freedom for some animals.
“Our Grand Cayman blue iguana got to walk around for 45 minutes. We watched him inspect the fish. He’s probably never seen fish before,” Miller said of Digger, who ambled around the empty building, stopping to peer in the 55,000-gallon Amazon River Basin tank.
Zookeepers in the primates building set up tables and chairs in the area where visitors usually wander to eat their lunches because they cannot socially distance in their small break rooms. That means the primates are seeing new behavior by their human minders.
“If I’m eating an apple, Tommy our male orangutan wants it. The animals are not used to seeing us eat,” DeLanty said.
And the animals are also not used to seeing their keepers wearing personal protective equipment. Since primates are so closely linked to humans, zookeepers who look after 27 individuals from 10 species are always extremely careful because of the possibility of infecting the animals.
In the primate building, keepers change into their work clothes at the zoo and only launder them at the facility in addition to constantly washing hands, wearing masks and limiting interaction, said DeLanty.
At the Northwestern Mutual Family Farm, life continues as normal because it’s important for domestic animals to have routines. So cows Ruby, Jovie, Kylie and Darcy continue to get milked at 4:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. every day. Their milk normally goes to Clock Shadow Creamery. But since Clock Shadow Creamery shut down during the pandemic, unfortunately, the milk is dumped.
“They’re used to being fed and milked at the same time. We haven’t changed that,” said Lisa Guglielmi, the farm’s area supervisor.
Because cows spook easily and are sensitive to sounds, keepers began playing music from an iPod so the bovine residents don’t get used to the silence, only to have to readjust when visitors return.
“I heard Michael Jackson one day. There are a lot of Disney soundtracks like ‘Frozen.’ I heard Michael Buble singing the other day,” said Guglielmi.
Though grocery stores have seen shortages ranging from toilet paper and eggs to beef and pork, the Milwaukee zoo’s commissary supervisor purchased six-month supplies of frozen meat and fish and other food eaten by residents, said Wikenhauser, who added that the meat fed to the lions, tigers and bears is not the same as what’s sold in grocery stores.
Since travel has been canceled for zoo staff, a male bongo scheduled to move to Milwaukee is still stuck at the zoo in San Francisco. Three lions made it under the wire – Patty Sharptooth and her two daughters Eloise and Amira arrived in February from a zoo in Kansas. They were just ending quarantine when the safer at home order went into effect.
“We wanted to get (Patty Sharptooth) up here (in the big cats facility) because we knew an empty building would be a better adjustment for her,” said Katie Kuhn, supervisor of the Florence Mila Borchert Big Cat Country.
Kuhn and other Milwaukee big cat keepers were surprised when a Malayan tiger named Nadia tested positive for COVID-19 at the Bronx Zoo in early April, followed by the news that several more big cats at the Bronx Zoo also were infected from an asymptomatic keeper.
“Because so much is unknown about coronavirus, we were thinking like ‘Oh, gosh – could we give that to them?’” said Kuhn. “Once it actually happened, it definitely became real.”
The lions, tigers, cheetahs, snow leopards and jaguars are often given cardboard boxes to shred as enrichment but that stopped because of questions about how long coronavirus might remain on cardboard. Toys in each area are always thoroughly cleaned and disinfected but now they’re not swapped between species.
Soon visitors will return to the zoo and life will likely get back to normal – gradually. The animals will still be there. And so will their keepers.
“We have moments where the quiet is nice,” said Kuhn, who supervises nine species of cats. “But it’s also sad. We’re here to educate people and share our animals with them.”