A Zoo Man's Notebook, 2025

[Coelacanth18]

Not that it’s rarely exhibited – just that you rarely actually see them, which is a viewpoint I believe I’ve heard expressed by more than one exasperated member of this page.

There was a lodge with a window for the visitors, but the beavers were almost impossible to see in it (they dug themselves into the dirt substrate and lay flat in it), and most visitors flat out refused to believe that we actually had them.

I have seen the same viewpoint expressed and it's interesting to hear you had a similar experience as a keeper, because I still find myself not sharing that experience. I've been to 6 zoos with beavers in recent memory (i.e. since 2019) and I haven't failed to see a beaver at any of them. 3 of them - Knoxville, Orange County and Smithsonian - I saw the beaver outside and active; the latter two I've been to multiple times and seen one active multiple times (though not every single time at Smithsonian). Of the other 3, one was active in a nocturnal house (Omaha) and at the other two (ASDM and Northwest Trek) they were sleeping in the den but clearly visible through a viewing window. Am I just incredibly lucky, or does exhibit design and/or individual personality maybe play a bigger role here?

 

[birdsandbats]

I've been to Minnesota Zoo many times and I've literally never seen the beavers there. I've been to Lincoln Park Zoo many times and the only time I've seen a beaver there was when a keeper had kicked them out of their den for a cleaning. Other than the aforementioned visit to Lincoln Park, I saw a beaver swimming once at Ochsner Park, my only other experience with captive beavers has been seeing a bull of fur inside of dens with viewing windows.

 

[Aardwolf]

@Coelacanth18 probably a mix of luck, exhibit design, and the individuals involved. I will say that Smithsonian is the one zoo where I most consistently see beavers on exhibit. Other than that, it's been hit or miss for me - I've seen them at Lincoln Park, Cleveland, Cheyenne Mountain, and a few other zoos, including some where they literally had no place to hide. At Minnesota, they've eluded me. I'm glad you've had good luck - they're such interesting creatures with such unique adaptations and which have played such a fascinating role in the culture and history of the continent. How many other zoo animals have literally had wars fought over them?

Today, we explore the story of a failure – one that sticks me with as one my most profound disappointments as a keeper.

Growing up, there are some animals which worm their way into our subconscious and which become special to us. For me, one such animal was the southern, or double-wattled, cassowary. From the first time I saw a picture of one, I was fascinated. When I saw one in the flesh and feathers, I was enchanted. I told myself that someday I’d work for one. And one day my chance came.

I was working at a non-AZA facility with a large safari park component. There were ostriches, emus, and greater rheas in abundance (this is the park where I hid from a male ostrich under a truck, described in post 54), and I suppose the owner wanted to complete the ratite series. And so he swapped some animals out for a young male cassowary. I named him Papua.

I was so thrilled to finally have a cassowary of my own to work with. That week, when I called home to talk with my parents, I excitedly started to describe our new acquisition. My mother cut me off. “[Aardwolf], I’m your mother,” she said. “I know what a cassowary is by now.”

The original plan had been to turn the cassowary loose in the drive-through safari park, which even impressionable, early 20-something me recognized as a terrible idea (and should have been a bigger red flag to me). I lobbied for the cassowary to be in the walk-through, traditional portion of the zoo, and he eventually agreed. An enclosure was knocked up – basically a fenced-in field with an open-front shed in the middle, decently large, but very open, and visible to visitors on three sides. As soon as the fencing was up, the cassowary was loaded into a trailer and driven from he quarantine barn to the parking lot closest to the new exhibit. The owner got out of the cab of the truck, and tossed me the keys to the trailer.

“He’s your bird now,” he said, “You want him? Go and get him.” With that, we went into his house, presumably for a beer and some TV.


Papua in the quarantine barn, before his transfer to the exhibit

And so, with two other keepers watching, I slid open the back of the trailer, and approached the cassowary. He was not pleased to see me. He was getting close to full grown, but still very immature – the plumage was brown, the casque barely formed, a slight rise on top of his head. At this age in their native New Guinea, cassowaries are often considered very tractable, let loose to wander around villages. It’s not until they become adults that they become truculent and potentially dangerous. Even so, this cassowary was scared and confused, and he wasn’t getting out of this trailer without a fight. He jumped up and kicked me – square in the chest. Thankfully, the cramped conditions of the trailer kept him from really building up moment, and I don’t think there was a lot of force behind the blow – even so, I do get to drop that I was kicked in the chest by a cassowary whenever I want to impress keepers. I managed to spin him around and grab him, then carried him the fifty yards or so to the pen. I shut him in, and considered the job done.

The assigned diet was grain, similar to the other ratites, but heavily supplemented with produce (by me – the little house I lived in at the time was surrounded by fruit trees, and in the summer I made a point of picking fruit for the animals every day to add to their meager produce allowance). Unfortunately, I didn’t get much time to enjoy working with the cassowary. Of the three keepers on that run, one (she who let the cheetahs out, post 33) had just left, and the other had just been fired for what I can charitably describe as gross incompetence. I was now the supervisor of two brand new keepers, and among other challenges, I was the only keeper who could take care of our big cats, the tigers and cheetahs. I gave the cassowary to a newer keeper. I asked her every day how the cassowary was, and she always said “Fine.”

That was me not asking the right question. To me, it meant – how is he behaving? Is he eating well? How does he react when you enter the enclosure? Does he use the shed for shelter? And a score of other things. To her, the question meant, is he still alive? And he was – until he wasn’t.

One day, not too long after we got him, he was found dead. We did an ad hoc necropsy, and even with our limited knowledge, it was clear something was wrong – the entire inside of the bird seemed to be one giant ulcer. When I asked the keeper about it, she said that he was always running back and forth on the fence line. That meshed with what I’d seen when I had a chance to check on him, but I’d thought it was personal, like maybe he was just acting like that because he was afraid of me after I carried him to the pen. But no – that’s what he was always like, it seems. And in her inexperienced eyes, she was fine. And I, as an inexperienced manager, didn’t think to ask the right questions.

Looking back, I suspect the stress of the wide-open exhibit with constant viewing did him in. He was also thin and hadn’t been eating well. I’d say that we should have put up more visual barriers, maybe planted some trees, or maybe kept him off exhibit until a quieter part of the year with fewer guests. We should have had a better plan in place for offloading him, something safer and not nearly so stressful on him. I should have made time for him – or kept him in quarantine until we had another cat keeper trained and the two newbies were better prepared. But really, we probably just shouldn’t have gotten him.

I buried Papua in a field behind a maintenance shed, keeping one of his claws as a reminder of him, which I have to this day. When I’d first got him, I’d had visions of watching him grow up into a handsome, powerful bird, one it would no longer be safe to go in with, but one to admire from the other side of a catch pen. I’d already started to dream up a training program for him to allow us to safely work with him. I thought we’d make great memories together. Instead, I have a claw, a single photo, and sense of deep disappointment that we didn’t do better by that bird.

 

[oflory]

I told myself that someday I’d work for one.

A really moving post - thank you. I'm not sure if the above is a typo but it seems like a very happy accident, if so. I hope you get a chance to work with another cassowary some day.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

@Coelacanth18 probably a mix of luck, exhibit design, and the individuals involved. I will say that Smithsonian is the one zoo where I most consistently see beavers on exhibit. Other than that, it's been hit or miss for me - I've seen them at Lincoln Park, Cleveland, Cheyenne Mountain, and a few other zoos, including some where they literally had no place to hide. At Minnesota, they've eluded me. I'm glad you've had good luck - they're such interesting creatures with such unique adaptations and which have played such a fascinating role in the culture and history of the continent. How many other zoo animals have literally had wars fought over them?

Today, we explore the story of a failure – one that sticks me with as one my most profound disappointments as a keeper.

Growing up, there are some animals which worm their way into our subconscious and which become special to us. For me, one such animal was the southern, or double-wattled, cassowary. From the first time I saw a picture of one, I was fascinated. When I saw one in the flesh and feathers, I was enchanted. I told myself that someday I’d work for one. And one day my chance came.

I was working at a non-AZA facility with a large safari park component. There were ostriches, emus, and greater rheas in abundance (this is the park where I hid from a male ostrich under a truck, described in post 54), and I suppose the owner wanted to complete the ratite series. And so he swapped some animals out for a young male cassowary. I named him Papua.

I was so thrilled to finally have a cassowary of my own to work with. That week, when I called home to talk with my parents, I excitedly started to describe our new acquisition. My mother cut me off. “[Aardwolf], I’m your mother,” she said. “I know what a cassowary is by now.”

The original plan had been to turn the cassowary loose in the drive-through safari park, which even impressionable, early 20-something me recognized as a terrible idea (and should have been a bigger red flag to me). I lobbied for the cassowary to be in the walk-through, traditional portion of the zoo, and he eventually agreed. An enclosure was knocked up – basically a fenced-in field with an open-front shed in the middle, decently large, but very open, and visible to visitors on three sides. As soon as the fencing was up, the cassowary was loaded into a trailer and driven from he quarantine barn to the parking lot closest to the new exhibit. The owner got out of the cab of the truck, and tossed me the keys to the trailer.

“He’s your bird now,” he said, “You want him? Go and get him.” With that, we went into his house, presumably for a beer and some TV.

View attachment 771523
Papua in the quarantine barn, before his transfer to the exhibit

And so, with two other keepers watching, I slid open the back of the trailer, and approached the cassowary. He was not pleased to see me. He was getting close to full grown, but still very immature – the plumage was brown, the casque barely formed, a slight rise on top of his head. At this age in their native New Guinea, cassowaries are often considered very tractable, let loose to wander around villages. It’s not until they become adults that they become truculent and potentially dangerous. Even so, this cassowary was scared and confused, and he wasn’t getting out of this trailer without a fight. He jumped up and kicked me – square in the chest. Thankfully, the cramped conditions of the trailer kept him from really building up moment, and I don’t think there was a lot of force behind the blow – even so, I do get to drop that I was kicked in the chest by a cassowary whenever I want to impress keepers. I managed to spin him around and grab him, then carried him the fifty yards or so to the pen. I shut him in, and considered the job done.

The assigned diet was grain, similar to the other ratites, but heavily supplemented with produce (by me – the little house I lived in at the time was surrounded by fruit trees, and in the summer I made a point of picking fruit for the animals every day to add to their meager produce allowance). Unfortunately, I didn’t get much time to enjoy working with the cassowary. Of the three keepers on that run, one (she who let the cheetahs out, post 33) had just left, and the other had just been fired for what I can charitably describe as gross incompetence. I was now the supervisor of two brand new keepers, and among other challenges, I was the only keeper who could take care of our big cats, the tigers and cheetahs. I gave the cassowary to a newer keeper. I asked her every day how the cassowary was, and she always said “Fine.”

That was me not asking the right question. To me, it meant – how is he behaving? Is he eating well? How does he react when you enter the enclosure? Does he use the shed for shelter? And a score of other things. To her, the question meant, is he still alive? And he was – until he wasn’t.

One day, not too long after we got him, he was found dead. We did an ad hoc necropsy, and even with our limited knowledge, it was clear something was wrong – the entire inside of the bird seemed to be one giant ulcer. When I asked the keeper about it, she said that he was always running back and forth on the fence line. That meshed with what I’d seen when I had a chance to check on him, but I’d thought it was personal, like maybe he was just acting like that because he was afraid of me after I carried him to the pen. But no – that’s what he was always like, it seems. And in her inexperienced eyes, she was fine. And I, as an inexperienced manager, didn’t think to ask the right questions.

Looking back, I suspect the stress of the wide-open exhibit with constant viewing did him in. He was also thin and hadn’t been eating well. I’d say that we should have put up more visual barriers, maybe planted some trees, or maybe kept him off exhibit until a quieter part of the year with fewer guests. We should have had a better plan in place for offloading him, something safer and not nearly so stressful on him. I should have made time for him – or kept him in quarantine until we had another cat keeper trained and the two newbies were better prepared. But really, we probably just shouldn’t have gotten him.

I buried Papua in a field behind a maintenance shed, keeping one of his claws as a reminder of him, which I have to this day. When I’d first got him, I’d had visions of watching him grow up into a handsome, powerful bird, one it would no longer be safe to go in with, but one to admire from the other side of a catch pen. I’d already started to dream up a training program for him to allow us to safely work with him. I thought we’d make great memories together. Instead, I have a claw, a single photo, and sense of deep disappointment that we didn’t do better by that bird.

The biggest question that all keepers ask of themselves, definitely more than once, IF ONLY.

 

[Aardwolf]

Thanks for catching that, @oflory – I frequently find myself being embarrassed when I read back through these and see typos/spelling mistakes that it’s too late for me to edit.

Today, we’ll talk about the foulest of fowl – the Indian peafowl! I’ve worked with this species at five facilities – two AZA, three non-AZA. All five of those facilities had one thing in common – their birds were (for the most part) free-roaming.

I sometimes have to take a step back and try to see the Indian peafowl through the eyes of the visitor. To us (zoo staff and regular zoo-goers alike), the Indian peafowl (I’m going to just call them peafowl at this point) is slightly more exotic than a barnyard bantam – a quasi-domestic species that’s just at home on your uncle’s farm as it is at the San Diego Zoo. To a visitor, however, it’s the quintessential exotic bird, one of the most beautiful and most visually striking of all bird species. Part of me wishes that I could go back to the first time I saw a peacock strut across a grassy lawn, its bejeweled tail dragging behind it, then throwing back its head to cry before fanning out into a stunning display.

Of course, at the time of that first view, I hadn’t been a peafowl keeper, so I would have been a lot happier to see one.

Peafowl excrement puts one in the mind of a particularly bad-smelling serving of soft-serve chocolate ice cream, and they make deposits of it with great regularity all over their domain. Be prepared to spend a lot of time cleaning it up (I found it best to let it harden a bit before trying to scrape it up).

Free-roamers can be very low maintenance birds in some ways, especially if your zoo takes a Darwinian approach (as my non-AZA employers did) where if they live, they live, if they die, they die, and the birth rates and death rates will roughly even out. Every spring I’d see a horde of little chicks following their mothers around, with gradually fewer appearing out of the brush every week, until maybe one or two made it to adulthood. If they wanted to leave the zoo, or fly into a predator exhibit, that was their business.

At the AZA zoos, we put a bit more effort into keeping them (as in “keeping them in the zoo” and “keeping them alive”). We’d keep new peafowl in an aviary to give them a sense of “home” before turning them loose; at one AZA zoo, we kept the females penned in a yard, with the understanding that the males wouldn’t wander too far, and that’s who the public really wanted to see anyway. Instead of just assuming they’d scavenge whatever they needed, we put out food for them – commercial poultry diet, sometimes some mealworms or chopped greens – which also helped discourage them from feeding in the exhibits of other animals, which did NOT have the option of going elsewhere to find a meal. We also rolled out bales of hay in secluded spots for them to bed down in (though they often preferred to roost in the treetops at night), and put up a few modest shelters for them. And, if one was sick or injured, we’d at least make an effort to catch it up for treatment.

Insider tip – if you are approaching a peacock on a perch, grabbing it by the legs may seem to be the easiest way to restrain it. About half a second after grabbing, your attention will then be drawn, inescapably, to the rather large, surprisingly sharp spur on either leg, which will have, at this point, made contact with your finger or palm. I’ve also made the mistake of grabbing at the tail coverts, much of which then come out in your hand, but that at least slows the bird down long enough to grab the body.

I may have snagged a few tails unthinkingly, but many visitors actively seek them out, and a peacock on display in a zoo is soon beset by visitors trying to get tail feathers. I would make a habit of collecting shed tail feathers and letting visitors have them – better than them trying to get out directly off the bird. Fortunately, being free roamers, the peafowl could escape to the trees, off path, or wherever they pleased to go.

Well, almost anywhere.

At the AZA zoo, we tried to keep the birds within our fence. In one case, we had a recently obtained white specimen who resisted the idea, and took to lurking around the worst parts of our city, while we chased after him in a zoo van, running down alleys after him and hoping no one took offense to our presence. On another occasion, I very much took my work home with me.

I lived about a mile from the zoo, and would often walk to and from work. One evening, I got home to the apartment complex – only to find three of our peahens were also there, milling around a courtyard. To the intense amusement of my neighbors, I spent the next hour running the birds down. The trick I eventually developed was herding one onto a ground-level patio, where it couldn’t figure out how to get back out, then grabbing it. I’d then take the offending bird back to my apartment, where I tossed it into the bathroom, before going out for the second, then the third. After I had all three, I ferried them out to the car one by one and drove them back to the zoo.

Free-roaming peafowl are rapidly becoming something you don’t see much of in zoos anymore, largely due to concerns about Avian Influenza. They also do pose something of a welfare paradox. On one hand, no other bird in our collection got to live a life so similar to that of its wild counterparts. On the other, it was hard to justify why this species received so much less direct care than the other birds. I’ve never seen a zoo keep green peafowl free-range, and I’m sure that a bird keeper who proposed keeping Congo peafowl in such a manner would be tarred, feathered, and run out of the department on a rail (a wooden one, but a crane-relative).

As beloved as peafowl are by the visitors, it’s like they were also understood, on some level, to be disposable, which isn’t how any zoo animal should be seen.

 

[birdsandbats]

On one hand, no other bird in our collection got to live a life so similar to that of its wild counterparts. On the other, it was hard to justify why this species received so much less direct care than the other birds.

Of course, ultimately, the lack of care DOES make their lives more closely resemble that of wild birds.

 

[Aardwolf]

Given my affection for the monitor lizards, it made sense to me that I’d be equally drawn to their New World counterparts, the tegus. I’d always read that they were very similar in many respects, so was looking forward to the chance of working with them. In truth, I found my experiences with the two species of tegu I worked with were pretty different, and while interesting, neither really held a candle to the varanids.

One of the species was the red tegu, represented by a single large specimen I worked with at a non-AZA zoo. This animal was something of a disappointment to me, who was used to the fast (physically and mentally) monitors. He struck me as kind of sluggish and dull. On nice summer days I’d take him out in the grass in the public area and let me wander around – or at least that was the intent. Usually, he’d just plop down in the grass and stare around, disinterestedly, until it was time to go back in. Just about the only monitor-like trait I could ascribe to him was a passion for eating. Whereas the monitors were (almost exclusively, thank you Gray’s) carnivores, the tegu took a mixed variety of meat, produce, and soaked chow. With the monitors, you could at least understand where they were putting all of the food, as they were so active. As far as I can tell with the tegu, most of it went to his head, which seemed to grow larger every day, until he reminded me more of a tadpole than a lizard.



Much more appealing to me was the second tegu I worked with.

One thing I’ve noticed since my earliest days in zoos and aquariums is how certain species can take on a tremendous significance to some curators and keepers. When I was in the reptile house of one AZA, there were many amazing and rare species in the collection, but the apples of our curator’s eye were the caiman lizards. He had done fieldwork with the species in the Peruvian Amazon, and since the species was still pretty uncommon in North American zoos (the first captive breeding having been just a few years earlier), it was considered quite the big deal that we had some. We had a few in the back, and two smaller specimens that went on exhibit with a pair of matamatas.

What I remember most about the caiman lizards in those days wasn’t the lizards themselves as much as it was their food. We kept huge tanks of apple snails behind the scenes to furnish the lizards with their favorite food (future captive-bred generations of caiman lizards have adapted to other food sources, but wild caught specimens were hooked on the snails). Years later, I remember visiting a fellow alum from that zoo at his new job, and we were walking around the back of the reptile house there. We passed by a big tank of apple snails, which he paused at. “Guess what we just got in,” he joked, wearily.



My curator’s fondness for caiman lizards left a mark on me, and years later, at another AZA zoo, when I had a chance to design a small reptile house, I knew I wanted caiman lizards – and soon, I had a pair of brothers. These boys had been captive bred and were willing to eat non-snail food (which was just as well, because try as I might, I couldn’t find a decent source, either at the local pet store, where all the snails were too small, or the grocery store, as the lizards turned their noses up at canned escargot). Instead, their former zoo sent a big bag of empty snail shells with them when they arrived (as with many small to medium sized reptiles, they were shipped to us via FedEx in padded boxes). We’d stuff the empty shells with carnivore diet and chopped fish, then give it to the lizards. Sometimes they’d lick out the mixture, but once in a while they’d do what I hoped to see, throw back their heads, and crush the shells in their jaws.

One of the boys sadly passed away shortly after he arrived – he was always a smaller, sicklier looking fellow – but the other quickly become the favorite non-monitor lizard I ever worked with (like the red tegu, he was always a bit too sluggish and dull to really have much of a personality in my eyes). Because the new exhibit wasn’t ready for him yet, I liked to take him out in warm days, and particularly to turn him loose in our sloth exhibit. I had to keep a close eye on him because I never knew where he would turn up, and I totally thought that I’d lost him once or twice, only to eventually spot a scaly tail hanging down from some hard-to-reach perch. Once, I even found him inside the sloth building, nestled alongside the sloths. To my surprise, he never seemed interested in swimming, and if placed in the water would immediately climb out.


My wayward caiman lizard hanging out in the sloth building with the sloths - and on such a nice day outside, too. I didn't think to get a picture of the time I actually found him in a box with the sloths, I was too frantic to extract him because I was worried he was going to get smooshed.

One day, a state politician (a big name locally, if not on the national level) paid a visit to our zoo, and the caiman lizard made a photo-op appearance with him, shared on the politician’s facebook page.

When I left that zoo, I made a special framed print that include a painting by the lizard, a photo of us together, and a laminated section of the bumpy, crocodilian-like shed skin from his back.

 

[Great Argus]

On nice summer days I’d take him out in the grass in the public area and let me wander around – or at least that was the intent. Usually, he’d just plop down in the grass and stare around, disinterestedly, until it was time to go back in. Just about the only monitor-like trait I could ascribe to him was a passion for eating.

Yeah sounds about right, it's a wonder to me they catch anything live. I've never seen one move with any sort of hurry even when food is involved. The Argentine Black & White I worked with would at least roam around when out of his terrarium, but he spent as much time standing as walking. They're not to be underestimated though, one time he had a brief wriggle moment as I was holding him and I had to fight to keep ahold of the lizard! Lot of muscle hidden in there for the occasion they actually choose to use it!

 

[Aardwolf]

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked with each of the big cats, to varying extents. Some have been volunteer opportunities that lasted only a few months, some have been relationships that have lasted years. The big cat that I’ve worked with the longest, the species that I’ve gotten to know the best, is also the species that scares me the most.

I spent 6 years as a jaguar keeper at an AZA zoo. The jaguar was the last big cat species that I worked with, and the one that I was most excited about. To me, it had everything – combining the muscular bulk of the lion and tiger with the lithe grace of the leopard, a stunningly beautiful coat, having a unique cultural and mythological history, and having the fascinating distinction of being the only true big cat to be native to the US – I liked to bring borderland jaguars up in keeper chats, rebranding the species as “Our American Big Cat.” At the end of my time working with the species, they were still my favorite – but I had a whole new appreciation for them.

If there’s one word I would use to describe jaguars, it’s “intense.” More so than any other cat, I always felt the eyes of our jaguars on me, watching. It wasn’t a fearful, nervous watching, either – it was the sort of watching when you can tell that they’re waiting for you to make a mistake. Watching them, I was always in the mind of a tightly coiled spring, waiting to explode into motion.

This was especially true for the younger of the two female jaguars that I cared for there. Every evening, the last thing I’d do before going home was circle back to the jaguar exhibit and triple check all of my locks, both in holding and the door going to the exhibit itself. I’d be standing in the keeper area, testing the lock that led into the habitat, and I’d see her spotted form crouched behind a rock or on a ledge overhead, waiting (and, I suspect, hoping) that I was going to open the door and step inside, and then she’d finally have me. Sometimes, her excitement would overwhelm her patience, and she’d hurl herself at the door while I was checking the lock, spending me sprawling backward as I watched her weight slam against the wire fence of the door. I’d pick myself up, while she landed neatly on her feet just inches away, giving me a look that said, “We know how this would go if the fence wasn’t here.”


The spotted jaguar, peering at me from the tunnel that lead to her indoor holding

So imagine my horror one day when I found myself looking at a jaguar without a fence in between us.

The jaguars were fed in their holding building, a concrete bunker behind the exhibit with two stalls, one for each cat. They usually received their diet inside, because it was the only way to get them indoors and locked up so we could service the outdoor exhibit. I locked our younger, feistier, spotted jaguar in her stall with her diet (carnivore diet of ground horse was the base diet, supplemented with rats, rabbits, chickens, fish, and occasionally venison – I always wanted to find a source of large turtles, such as red-eared sliders, to offer as enrichment, but never was able to find a healthy, safe source). Then, I locked in her exhibit mate, the much older black jaguar. This cat had really slowed down with age, both physically and in terms of personality, and was a lot more serene (to the extent that I could scratch her back through the fence, something I never would have dreamed of doing with the spotted). I put the food in her stall, stepped out and locked the door, then opened the shift door to let her in to eat her diet. As she ate, I gave the lock one more tug just to make triple sure it was secure.

The lock broke.

The two halves fell, separately, to the floor of the holding building. The sliding door slid open about an inch, and in that inch gap, the jaguar was staring back at me. It would have been very easy for her to slid the door open a little more, and then join me in the keeper area – briefly. I consider myself lucky that in times of emergency, I usually react very quickly, and save the nervous breakdown for the immediate aftermath. I was able to quickly slide the door back shut with my foot, while I grabbed the carabiner that I had my work keys on. I used the carabiner to clip the door closed, then radioed for someone to bring me another lock ASAP.

Interestingly enough, this same black jaguar, years before I started, had gotten loose due to keeper error, and briefly wandered around the immediate vicinity of her exhibit. She was thankfully called back into the exhibit by a keeper in the holding building, which allowed other staff to shut her back inside.


Older black jaguar, sunning herself on the rock wall at the back of her exhibit

The two female jaguars largely ignored each other, and I don’t think I ever saw them interact, except in the most subtle of ways. One would be lying in a sunspot on a warm day, the other would start to approach, wanting the spot for herself, and before she got there, the first would get up and saunter off – she would never acknowledge the other cat was coming, and seemed determined to pretend like she was getting up as her own decision. If we hadn’t separated them for feeding, however, I suspect that they might have fought. I did see the younger, spotted female with a bloody nose once in a while when I came in the mornings, and wondered if it was a sign that they’d had a spat overnight.

Jags are among the most difficult to cats to enrich because of their jaw power, and it’s hard to find a toy that will hold up to them. Regrettably, they also seem to view every toy as a potential food item, and we were always worried that they’d break a chunk off of, say, a boomer ball and ingest it.


Investigating the enrichment possibilities of a barrel

The enclosure was built as if it was designed to withstand a nuclear blast – or at least withstand having one of the tall trees that stood nearby falling directly on it, which it was. It was an old enclosure of about 2000 square feet or so – not terribly large, though probably adequate for their needs. It had a small pool on one end, a large rocky backdrop, and a few climbing structures, though I feel that we didn’t take nearly as much advantage as we could have of the towering height of the exhibit. I sometimes thought that the exhibit might have worked better for puma, snow leopard, leopard, or clouded leopard, those species being more willing to climb and benefit from vertical complexity. Jaguars are the species of big cat that I feel often gets the short-end of the stick in terms of exhibit size; they are larger cats, but the perceived need to have them completely enclosed limits the size of their exhibit at many zoos. I’ve only seen the species in open-topped habitats at two zoos – and I will admit, seeing a jaguar in a tree above my head at Little Rock was an experience that made me fairly nervous. They were very tolerant of a wide range of weather conditions, and we wouldn’t lock them in for cold unless it got below 20 F (the building had a heater and could get fairly toasty), though we would lock them inside in the case of severe windstorms, in case a tree did fall on the exhibit. Trust but verify.

I like to think that I saved the life of one of our visitors from the jags one day. The jaguar exhibit was at the end of a cul de sac. As I was walking down the main path one day, I saw a young woman had hopped the fence in front of the exhibit so she could photograph our black female, sleeping on her hanging swing platform, more easily through the mesh. She did not see the spotted jaguar, crouching nearby. The fencing that fronted the jaguar exhibit had openings about four inches square – wide enough for a cat to reach through, grab a visitor, and drag them up against the fence for a severe, perhaps fatal, mauling. I don’t ever remember screaming as loud as I did right then as I yelled for her to back up while I ran down the path – I think the scream might have startled the spotted jaguar into abandoning her pounce. The young lady had the grace to be suitably embarrassed and horrified when I told her what situation she almost found herself in.

Still, perhaps the scariest jaguar experience I had wasn’t directly due to the jaguar. The old black female was due for a vet check up, so we sedated her and spread her out on the floor of the holding building for the exam. Standing over her was one staff member with a shotgun, just in case things went sideways. Huddled over the cat in the small, bunker-like building, I had images of the gun going off, the shell ricocheting around the dens and managing to hit every single one of us, except probably the cat.

 

[snowleopard]

Jaguars are surely one of the most dangerous animals kept in zoos, highlighted by your post and also the fatal, tragic attack at Denver Zoo in 2007.

I particularly liked your Jaguar comments and it's fascinating that I've seen Jaguars in open-topped exhibits at Little Rock Zoo, Saint Louis Zoo, Greater Vancouver Zoo, Discovery Wildlife Park, Great Cats World Park and Parken Zoo. That adds up to SIX zoos I've visited that have chosen a slightly risky way to showcase the species and at Great Cats World Park the Jaguars are even encouraged to climb the fence for food!

 

[birdsandbats]

Jaguars are surely one of the most dangerous animals kept in zoos, highlighted by your post and also the fatal, tragic attack at Denver Zoo in 2007.

I particularly liked your Jaguar comments and it's fascinating that I've seen Jaguars in open-topped exhibits at Little Rock Zoo, Saint Louis Zoo, Greater Vancouver Zoo, Discovery Wildlife Park, Great Cats World Park and Parken Zoo. That adds up to SIX zoos I've visited that have chosen a slightly risky way to showcase the species and at Great Cats World Park the Jaguars are even encouraged to climb the fence for food!

Milwaukee also has an open-topped Jaguar exhibit, which I believe you would have seen.

Actually, all three zoos I've seen Jaguar at - Milwaukee, Saint Louis, and ZooAve in Costa Rica - had open-topped exhibits.

 

[Strathmorezoo]

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked with each of the big cats, to varying extents. Some have been volunteer opportunities that lasted only a few months, some have been relationships that have lasted years. The big cat that I’ve worked with the longest, the species that I’ve gotten to know the best, is also the species that scares me the most.

I spent 6 years as a jaguar keeper at an AZA zoo. The jaguar was the last big cat species that I worked with, and the one that I was most excited about. To me, it had everything – combining the muscular bulk of the lion and tiger with the lithe grace of the leopard, a stunningly beautiful coat, having a unique cultural and mythological history, and having the fascinating distinction of being the only true big cat to be native to the US – I liked to bring borderland jaguars up in keeper chats, rebranding the species as “Our American Big Cat.” At the end of my time working with the species, they were still my favorite – but I had a whole new appreciation for them.

If there’s one word I would use to describe jaguars, it’s “intense.” More so than any other cat, I always felt the eyes of our jaguars on me, watching. It wasn’t a fearful, nervous watching, either – it was the sort of watching when you can tell that they’re waiting for you to make a mistake. Watching them, I was always in the mind of a tightly coiled spring, waiting to explode into motion.

This was especially true for the younger of the two female jaguars that I cared for there. Every evening, the last thing I’d do before going home was circle back to the jaguar exhibit and triple check all of my locks, both in holding and the door going to the exhibit itself. I’d be standing in the keeper area, testing the lock that led into the habitat, and I’d see her spotted form crouched behind a rock or on a ledge overhead, waiting (and, I suspect, hoping) that I was going to open the door and step inside, and then she’d finally have me. Sometimes, her excitement would overwhelm her patience, and she’d hurl herself at the door while I was checking the lock, spending me sprawling backward as I watched her weight slam against the wire fence of the door. I’d pick myself up, while she landed neatly on her feet just inches away, giving me a look that said, “We know how this would go if the fence wasn’t here.”

View attachment 772455
The spotted jaguar, peering at me from the tunnel that lead to her indoor holding

So imagine my horror one day when I found myself looking at a jaguar without a fence in between us.

The jaguars were fed in their holding building, a concrete bunker behind the exhibit with two stalls, one for each cat. They usually received their diet inside, because it was the only way to get them indoors and locked up so we could service the outdoor exhibit. I locked our younger, feistier, spotted jaguar in her stall with her diet (carnivore diet of ground horse was the base diet, supplemented with rats, rabbits, chickens, fish, and occasionally venison – I always wanted to find a source of large turtles, such as red-eared sliders, to offer as enrichment, but never was able to find a healthy, safe source). Then, I locked in her exhibit mate, the much older black jaguar. This cat had really slowed down with age, both physically and in terms of personality, and was a lot more serene (to the extent that I could scratch her back through the fence, something I never would have dreamed of doing with the spotted). I put the food in her stall, stepped out and locked the door, then opened the shift door to let her in to eat her diet. As she ate, I gave the lock one more tug just to make triple sure it was secure.

The lock broke.

The two halves fell, separately, to the floor of the holding building. The sliding door slid open about an inch, and in that inch gap, the jaguar was staring back at me. It would have been very easy for her to slid the door open a little more, and then join me in the keeper area – briefly. I consider myself lucky that in times of emergency, I usually react very quickly, and save the nervous breakdown for the immediate aftermath. I was able to quickly slide the door back shut with my foot, while I grabbed the carabiner that I had my work keys on. I used the carabiner to clip the door closed, then radioed for someone to bring me another lock ASAP.

Interestingly enough, this same black jaguar, years before I started, had gotten loose due to keeper error, and briefly wandered around the immediate vicinity of her exhibit. She was thankfully called back into the exhibit by a keeper in the holding building, which allowed other staff to shut her back inside.

View attachment 772456
Older black jaguar, sunning herself on the rock wall at the back of her exhibit

The two female jaguars largely ignored each other, and I don’t think I ever saw them interact, except in the most subtle of ways. One would be lying in a sunspot on a warm day, the other would start to approach, wanting the spot for herself, and before she got there, the first would get up and saunter off – she would never acknowledge the other cat was coming, and seemed determined to pretend like she was getting up as her own decision. If we hadn’t separated them for feeding, however, I suspect that they might have fought. I did see the younger, spotted female with a bloody nose once in a while when I came in the mornings, and wondered if it was a sign that they’d had a spat overnight.

Jags are among the most difficult to cats to enrich because of their jaw power, and it’s hard to find a toy that will hold up to them. Regrettably, they also seem to view every toy as a potential food item, and we were always worried that they’d break a chunk off of, say, a boomer ball and ingest it.

View attachment 772457
Investigating the enrichment possibilities of a barrel

The enclosure was built as if it was designed to withstand a nuclear blast – or at least withstand having one of the tall trees that stood nearby falling directly on it, which it was. It was an old enclosure of about 2000 square feet or so – not terribly large, though probably adequate for their needs. It had a small pool on one end, a large rocky backdrop, and a few climbing structures, though I feel that we didn’t take nearly as much advantage as we could have of the towering height of the exhibit. I sometimes thought that the exhibit might have worked better for puma, snow leopard, leopard, or clouded leopard, those species being more willing to climb and benefit from vertical complexity. Jaguars are the species of big cat that I feel often gets the short-end of the stick in terms of exhibit size; they are larger cats, but the perceived need to have them completely enclosed limits the size of their exhibit at many zoos. I’ve only seen the species in open-topped habitats at two zoos – and I will admit, seeing a jaguar in a tree above my head at Little Rock was an experience that made me fairly nervous. They were very tolerant of a wide range of weather conditions, and we wouldn’t lock them in for cold unless it got below 20 F (the building had a heater and could get fairly toasty), though we would lock them inside in the case of severe windstorms, in case a tree did fall on the exhibit. Trust but verify.

I like to think that I saved the life of one of our visitors from the jags one day. The jaguar exhibit was at the end of a cul de sac. As I was walking down the main path one day, I saw a young woman had hopped the fence in front of the exhibit so she could photograph our black female, sleeping on her hanging swing platform, more easily through the mesh. She did not see the spotted jaguar, crouching nearby. The fencing that fronted the jaguar exhibit had openings about four inches square – wide enough for a cat to reach through, grab a visitor, and drag them up against the fence for a severe, perhaps fatal, mauling. I don’t ever remember screaming as loud as I did right then as I yelled for her to back up while I ran down the path – I think the scream might have startled the spotted jaguar into abandoning her pounce. The young lady had the grace to be suitably embarrassed and horrified when I told her what situation she almost found herself in.

Still, perhaps the scariest jaguar experience I had wasn’t directly due to the jaguar. The old black female was due for a vet check up, so we sedated her and spread her out on the floor of the holding building for the exam. Standing over her was one staff member with a shotgun, just in case things went sideways. Huddled over the cat in the small, bunker-like building, I had images of the gun going off, the shell ricocheting around the dens and managing to hit every single one of us, except probably the cat.

I'm pretty sure that Dublin zoo kept Jaguar in an open topped enclosure. Your comment about triple checking the locks,how true that is,its almost bordering on paranoia, in a very responsible way ! There has been more than a few times when the doubt has crept into my mind, did I lock the door properly, I know that I did but once the doubt is in your mind, it won't go away. The times I've had to return and double check. The really annoying thing, I have never left a door unlocked! Oh the joys of being a zookeeper.

 

[Pertinax]

Interesting read...Jaguars are very beautiful cats but give me the 'heebiegeebies' as I know they can be so dangerous in captivity. Perhaps the most lethal of all the mammals?

 

[DesertRhino150]

Interesting read...Jaguars are very beautiful cats but give me the 'heebiegeebies' as I know they can be so dangerous in captivity. Perhaps the most lethal of all the mammals?

The EAZA's Best Practice Guidelines for the jaguar seem to suggest so - to directly quote:

'As a large predator with a powerful body, strong bite, and excellent jumping and ambush capability, the jaguar should be classified as an institution’s most dangerous species regarding emergency escape and response procedures.'

 

[Aardwolf]

It's very interesting about jaguars - as dangerous as they can be to work with in zoos (I know of a few cases of keepers being killed or mauled), they have a much less lethal track record in the wild than do lions, tigers, and leopards, and I've never heard of a famous man-eating jaguar, whereas I have the other three species. Years ago, I met the late wildlife biologist Alan Rabinowitz, who studied jaguars in Belize and is responsible for the creation of that country's Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Preserve for jaguars. He told me that he was writing a new book on jaguars (later published as "An Indomitable Beast" that would include a chapter on zookeepers and their relations with jaguars.

No, here's a group of animals which really gives me the heebiegeebies... and not without cause.

I’ve worked with three species of gibbons in zoos. At one AZA zoo, I volunteered with a breeding pair of white-cheeked gibbons, who had two young during my time with them. At a non-AZA facility, I worked with a singleton white-cheek, a singleton white-handed (Lar) gibbon, and a pair of siamangs.

I’ve never really been much of a primate person. I love carnivores. I love hoofstock. I love obscure little beasties, such as rodents and bats and that weird clade that we used to lump together as insectivores. But I’ve never especially liked working with primates. And I think that I can trace that antipathy towards our closest relatives back to my earliest experiences with gibbons – the very first primates I ever worked with.

Looking back, it surprises me a little – I associate gibbons strongly with my first day in the zoo field, as a young volunteer keeper aide, barely out of middle school. It was a beautiful summer morning, and I was walking the zoo grounds on my way to volunteer orientation. Everything was quiet, as the zoo hadn’t opened yet and no visitors were present – quiet, that is, until a series of powerful whoops, reaching a crescendo that made the very air vibrate, broke the silence. Gibbons are most prone to call in the early morning, and it was a treat to have that special moment to myself on that first day. I took it as a good omen.

Reality was a little more disappointing.

The gibbons were located in an older part of the zoo, a cage originally built for big cats or bears, repurposed for smaller animals. It was a respectable, if not remarkable size, but definitely would have benefited from being taller (side note: I feel like, in many ways, the most important development in zoo management in recent decades is the concept of collection planning. In the old days, you never knew what animals you were going to have, since animals didn’t live too long and you had to see what was available from dealers or traders to fill exhibits, so a lot of caging was very utilitarian – it had to hold a lion one year, a chimp the next, a baby elephant the year after. Actually planning on what specific animals a zoo was going to have and an exhibit was going to hold allowed zoos to begin making enclosures that are specifically tailored to the very different needs of different species). It was in a row of cages, with a keeper corridor running along the back, and a walkway between each exhibit, about the width of a sidewalk, with the visitors viewing the animals from the front, held back by a fence. At the back of each exhibit was a small stone building, which served as holding dens for the animals.

The male gibbon taught me several important lessons over our years together, first and foremost being, “Even if you haven’t done anything to deserve it, some animals are still going to take a dislike to you. Sometimes a strong, very personal dislike.” And boy did he dislike me. This originally just manifested itself as following me along the mesh, chattering angrily as I walked by. Things gradually got uglier. One day, as I was walking by down the narrow keeper corridor between the row of cages, he shot a long, thin arm out through the mesh and grabbed a hank of my (fairly short) hair, and with a hard jerk slammed my head against the side of the cage. I was still seeing stars, but thankfully stumbled backwards, falling against another cage (I don’t remember who was in that one, probably one of our smaller felids), so at least falling out of his range before he could try again.

After that, I always walked very cautiously past the gibbons, and always made sure I knew where he was. I never underestimated his reach again. Strangely, his mate never showed any hostility towards me, and over the years as they presented the zoo with two offspring, the kids seemed friendly, playful, and curious – not that I tried getting too cozy with them, lest I provoke their father’s protective ire. I especially enjoyed watching the coats of the infants change color as they matured, confirming their sexes.

I had similar experiences at the non-AZA zoo with both the white-cheek and the white-hand, both males (so maybe it was a male thing… looking back at it, all of the keepers in the section that took care of the white-cheeked gibbons at the AZA zoo were women). The white-hand in particular scared the hell out of me – I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such constant, apoplectic rage from an animal on a daily basis. It was all the more concerning because their enclosures were, as best as I could figure out, made of two-by-fours, chicken wire, zipties, and spit, so every time a gibbon slammed on the side of the exhibit, the entire cage looked like it was about to fall apart (the two males were housed separately in adjacent exhibits). Everything was made of wood of poor quality, so cleaning every day was a cause of worry for me – should I try using water to scrub the abundant, liquidy gibbon poop off of everything? Or would the water just make the damned cage rot even faster? After leaving that zoo, I didn't return again for over 10 years, and when I did (as a visitor), I was glad to see those wretched cages were gone.


Our white-handed, or Lar, gibbon, in a rare moment of quiet before he immediately began expressing his hatred for me again.

My experiences with the siamangs was the complete contrast. They were some of the gentlest, most serene primates I’ve ever worked with. Their movements, while graceful, were still so much slower and more deliberate than the other gibbons, which seemed to throw themselves around with mad abandon. Even when they called, it was done almost lazily, like they were going through the motions. And they actually seemed, if not pleased, than at least ok with seeing me every day – particularly when, after feeding them, I’d give each of them a small marshmallow as their daily treat, which they’d carefully pluck from my palm with leathery hands. Another interesting thing about siamangs – they’ve always struck me as the most terrestrial of the gibbons, and I saw ours on the ground as often as I did on a perch or hanging from the mesh.

The siamangs also had a better enclosure than the other gibbons at this zoo, including an actual holding building – with heat! And lights! – not just a plywood shed with a bulb that was supposed to keep the animal just warm enough to get through the winter. It was easily twice the size of both of the other gibbon exhibits put together, and actually had access to sun (the other gibbons were in the shadow of a building more most of the day), grass, and variable climbing structures. Had the choice been mine, I’d have done my best to rehome the other two gibbons and invested all of my resources in expanding and further improving the lot of our siamangs.


The siamang exhibit. It wasn't much, but it was a heck of a lot better than what the other gibbons had.

As exhibit animals, I’ve always had mixed reviews of gibbons. On the one hand, the fiercely territorial nature of gibbons, and their social structure of a pair and their offspring, limits your group size. Comparing them with other primates, it’s like the difference between flamingos and cranes – a large, bustling, active flock of the one, versus a pair of the other. On the other hand, their vocalizations are crowd-stoppers, some of the most iconic sounds of any zoo (I actually lived on grounds at the non-AZA zoo, and grew to really resent the early morning wake-up calls from the gibbons, especially on my rare days off). They also have a decent amount of mixed-species potential, though I’ve never worked in such an exhibit. And, of course, their acrobatic leaping and swinging through the branches in truly something to behold, especially in an exhibit that really gives them space to build up momentum; I’ve heard “aerial ballet” used as a description, and I think it fits well.

 

[Austin the Sengi]

View attachment 772499
Our white-handed, or Lar, gibbon, in a rare moment of quiet before he immediately began expressing his hatred for me again.

@Aardwolf, looking at the image, I’m starting to think that the male “Lar” Gibbon that you worked with might actually be a Silvery Gibbon (Hylobates moloch). Either way, it’s still impressive that you got work with such an animal; even if said gibbon never liked you one bit.

 

[birdsandbats]

Yeah, that animal definitely isn't a Lar Gibbon. Looks like either Silvery or Mueller's.

 

[Aardwolf]

I see what you guys are saying, and while I can't go back and be certain - this was about twenty years ago - all I can tell you is that this is a very washed out, weirdly lit photo. At least in my memory, he didn't look nearly that gray

 

[Coelacanth18]

I was going to say it looks like a Mueller's or Hoolock, or maybe a hybrid gibbon of some kind. It doesn't look like a Silvery and from what I know the captive population for that species is pretty well-documented. Either way he sounds like a joy to have worked around

I'm surprised to hear you've gotten mixed feedback on gibbons as exhibit animals: between their agility and songs I've always found them one of the most captivating zoo primates - maybe even zoo animals altogether. At Los Angeles you can hear the Siamang pair from any corner of that big zoo and it's one of the only animal calls I've seen that makes people stop dead in their tracks to listen. I've even had people record gibbon songs from a ways outside a zoo thinking they're birds of some kind, only to be shocked when I tell them who is actually singing!

For anyone who loves gibbons and gibbonsong: the Gibbon Conservation Center out here in California is home to 30 or 40 apes on a fairly small plot of land, and almost like a wolf pack all it takes is one solo or duet to set the whole population off into booming song. The feeling of being completely surrounded by melodious gibbon howling is one of those intense animal experiences that could probably either enrapture or terrify you, but either way it is highly memorable.