Opening wallet, sticking neck out for $16M upgrade

The giraffes LINCOLN, will have heated floors.

And they’ll have zookeepers with college degrees and ipads to track the animals’ every meal and mood swing; a full-time veterinarian to keep them in good health; and one of the five biggest giraffe houses in the country, featuring, in addition to warm floors, air-conditioning and 24hour video monitoring.

The Sumatran tigers will have all of this, too, plus a pond and waterfall. So will the red pandas, but they’ll have two enclosures, connected by an elevated loglike passageway letting them move above the heads of zoo guests.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that when the Lincoln Children’s Zoo unveils its $16 million, 10-acre expansion next spring, visitors will focus their attention on the new displays designed to put them face to face with rare and threatened and storybook species.

They can share the front seat of a Jeep with a 300pound tiger, a 4-inch-thick pane of glass protecting them from becoming dinner.

They can stand on an elevated platform — indoors or out — to feed lettuce to giraffes at eye level.

They can explore a rainforest from a suspended platform, side by side with spider monkeys.

But visitors won’t see the attention the zoo pays to what it calls its animalsmanagement system — the care and feeding of its fourlegged attractions.

“Animal care has come 180 degrees from where it was when I started,” said John Chapo, the zoo’s president and CEO and who has worked at zoos for 46 years. “The commitment to animal welfare, nutrition and conservation is unprecedented compared to what it was.”

And this is what it was, he said: “Animals were basically thrown into a box.”

Now, before that box is built, a veterinarian consults with designers to draft enclosures with animals in mind. For example, male giraffes can grow to 18 feet, and their tongues can stretch another 18 inches, so all the heating, cooling and electrical fixtures better be out of reach.

“The vet worked with the architects and engineers to design the buildings, keeping the welfare of the animals as a priority,” said Ryan Gross, the zoo’s director of strategic communication. “He said, ‘Here’s the best way to build this building to care for this animal.’ ”

The enclosures will be climate-controlled for year-round viewing, with rubber-padded floors in some cases. The giraffes will have enough headroom, the tigers ample water, the spider monkeys plenty of perches — and all of their handlers will have enough technology to monitor their every move.

Video cameras will allow zookeepers to monitor animals at all hours, even from their couches at home.

But what Chapo really wants to showcase now, nearly a year before the new buildings and displays open, is what the public will see during the day — even though it’s still a full-blown construction site, covered in hard hats and excavators and a sign warning visitors not to look at the welders.

“A year from now,” Chapo said Tuesday, “if you’re standing here, you’re toast.”

Here used to be the zoo’s parking lot along South 27th Street, but next year will be home to a pair of young Sumatran tigers. The animals — brothers born in separate litters at the San Diego Safari Park — will arrive this fall, once their home is complete.