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Our guide to Columbus's favorite attraction reveals the zoo you never knew: sex, drugs (sort of) and a whole lot of poop, as well as the inside scoop on animals gone wild.
Grahm Jones/Courtesy Columbus Zoo and Aquarium
It’s easy to take the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium for granted. Its triumphs—rated among the best in the country every year—are old news. Jack Hanna, penguins, manatees, Colo the gorilla all blend into the background, just another part of living in Central Ohio, along with Buckeye games, rainy springs and White Castle hamburgers.
Too bad, really. The zoo is a truly remarkable place. And what makes it so aren’t the awards and accolades. It’s how the unnatural becomes natural. The zoo’s 1,500 employees (including seasonal staff) manage to make it easy to forget there aren’t supposed to be polar bears in Delaware County.
In what follows, Columbus Monthly takes you behind the scenes of the zoo by hanging around with a vet, getting the inside scoop from keepers and introducing a fascinating cast of characters: escape-happy goats, ill-mannered gorillas, gay flamingos and a deadbeat penguin named after a former OSU coach, to name a few. Our ultimate zoo guide answers the questions you really need to know: What’s the most expensive animal? Where does all the poop go? How do you weigh a sea turtle? And once you figure out those riddles—as well as some of the other perplexing challenges faced every day by the zoo—you’ll no longer take Columbus’s favorite tourist attraction for granted.
.What is the most expensive animal?
Choosing the most expensive animal at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium is somewhat of a tossup. On the one hand, manatees eat hundreds of heads of romaine lettuce each day. On the other hand, koalas . . . well, check this out.
To acquire the original pair of Victorian koalas that came to Columbus in the early 1990s, zoo officials hosted representatives from the Australian government to show that their staff and facilities were equipped to handle the marsupials. They also needed to prove to the Aussies they had backup food available in case the airplanes that bring their eucalyptus from Arizona twice each week are grounded. Oh, and the cost to bring in eucalyptus? It was more than $30,000 in 2010 alone. (It could be far more; however, the zoo enjoys free airfare from Delta Airlines.)
The two currently at the zoo—Wruwallin, the female, and Moondani, the male—are a breeding pair of Queensland koalas that have produced two offspring, which are no longer at the zoo. In accordance with the Australian government’s policies, two greenhouses were built behind the zoo’s business office specifically for growing backup eucalyptus (only several weeks’ worth).
“It costs a lot to feed an elephant because of its size,” says Dusty Lombardi, the zoo’s vice president of animal care. “But when you’re thinking about an 18-pound koala, this is the most expensive animal to feed.”
Twice each week—Tuesday and Friday—the zoo gets flown-in shipments of the tree from Australian Outback Plants just outside Phoenix. “We receive 90 pounds on one day and 45 pounds on the other day,” Lombardi says. “They might not really eat 135 pounds [per week], but they get 135 pounds.”
The cost alone of feeding the creatures makes them very rare in American zoos. “It’s a big commitment,” Lombardi says, “and not all zoos are willing to make that commitment.”
Since they only eat eucalyptus, which contains little in the way of protein, koalas have a low metabolism and sleep for up to 20 hours a day. That’s right: All that trouble for a pair of animals that offer visitors a roughly 17 percent chance of seeing them while they’re awake.
—Ben Zenitsky
Zoo poo
As you can imagine, elephants are capable of leaving some pretty substantial droppings. But there are thousands of other animals at the Columbus Zoo as well, and each one leaves its own special mess for zoo workers to clean. This brings up an obvious question: Where does all that animal poop go?
“It’s not a dirty job,” insists Dave Etzkorn, the zoo’s vice president of facilities and construction. “Is it a stinky job? On hot days, it probably is, yes.” Five days a week, he and his team collect all the excrement and soiled bedding from the zoo’s enclosures, stuff them into
55-gallon drums and load the haul into a truck headed northbound.
The zoo works with Delaware-based Price Farms Organics, and the folks there mix the waste—all 170 tons a year of it—with a veritable cornucopia of other fun stuff, such as horse dung from nearby farms, food scraps and coffee grounds from nearby restaurants, to make what owner Tom Price calls Zoo Brew (shown). The concoction, which he sells at his site for $23.50 a cubic yard, is chock-full of “good bugs,” according to Price. He’s referring to microorganisms and bacteria that greatly foster the growth of plants and grasses. “It’s pretty natural,” he says. Of the smelly work environment, Price laughs. “The odor coming off that manure is very mild after that first few days because it’s been mixed with wood chips and coffee grounds.” It’s then left to sit for about two years, during which it’s churned up to five times.
The story of how Price and the zoo came to such a mutually beneficial agreement involves Jack Hanna’s intrepid salesmanship. Many years ago, Hanna attended a large picnic at Price’s farm, Pork-Q-Pine Farms, which is adjacent to the compost site. “Jack was speaking,” Price recalls, “and came up to me after and said, ‘Have you ever gotten our product from the zoo?’ I said no. He said, ‘I’ll look into it.’ ”
A word of advice: Be careful not to call it “waste” around Price. “We don’t call it waste anymore,” he says, “because it’s a recyclable product. Animal manure is the normal term.”
—Ben Zenitsky
The name game
The zoo has no policy for naming animals. Sometimes, the choice is made via a contest, such as the two elephant calves, Beco and Bodhi. Or the zoo might leverage the opportunity for fundraising; donors selected the names of the lion cubs Adia and Mekita in 2009.
Most of the time, however, keepers are responsible. As the head keeper for the zoo’s Shores department, Becky Ellsworth has come up with such names as Valentino, Chirriante and Peru for the Humboldt penguins under her care. “They’re from South America,” she says. “We try to stick with Spanish names.”
Unless, that is, Buckeye football intrudes. When a penguin was born the day after the 2002 national championship, she and her colleagues (after strong encouragement from higher-ups at the zoo) broke from tradition and named the chick Tressel.
Hey, at least they didn’t name it Clarett.
—Dave Ghose
Zoo animals gone wild
No matter how much training zoo animals receive, they are still wild creatures. Even the most well-behaved of the bunch—the ones that travel with Jack Hanna—have been known to surprise the occasional TV host and politician. A baby cougar nipped Newt Gingrich on the chin during a trip Hanna made to Washington, D.C., while a fox bit Charlie Gibson on the finger during an appearance on “Good Morning America.” Then there’s what happened to Gibson’s co-host at the time, Joan Lunden. During a visit to Columbus, Oscar the gorilla nailed her with a handful of feces.
Here are a few more tales of zoo animals behaving badly (or wildly, if you prefer):
The escape artists
Markhors, a type of Asian mountain goat, are perhaps the most difficult animals to keep contained at the Columbus Zoo. Adam Felts, head keeper for Asia Quest, recalls watching one goat twist its body sideways in mid air to fit through the mesh barrier that’s supposed to keep the nimble animals in place. “It was like The Matrix,” Felts says. “It was absolutely amazing.”
Some zoos with markhors eventually accept that escapes are unavoidable. “We have talked to some zoos,” says Dusty Lombardi, vice president for animal care. “They know their animals get out at night, and they cause no problems. They graze. They eat some trees. And then in the morning, they hop back.” Columbus Zoo officials aren’t willing to allow that, however. They’ve added additional fencing and eventually plan to mesh over the entire exhibit.
A surprise meal
Earlier this summer, the public got to see a different side of the zoo’s twin polar bears, Aurora and Anana. When a goose flew into the Polar Frontier exhibit, the bears made quick work of the intruder. “One ran with the body, and the other had the head,” recalls Dana Suite Hatcher, the zoo’s animal nutrition manager who witnessed the incident. “He’s standing in front of the viewing windows with the head, juggling it. I’m like, ‘We’ve got to get this off view now!’ ” The public had a mixed reaction, however. “Half the visitors are cheering for the bears and the other half are going, ‘Oh, my God! Save the goose!’ ” says Patty Peters, the zoo’s vice president of community relations.
The most dangerous animal
Lombardi nominates Rana the king cobra for the honor. “I would not want to be bit by a venomous snake,” she says. “It does so many things to your central nervous system. It shuts you down. You become paralyzed for a while.” A bite from a king cobra, the most deadly snake at the zoo, has enough venom in it to bring down an elephant, according to National Geographic. Rana has never attacked anyone, but another snake did bite a keeper about a decade ago. “He was bit on the leg,” Lombardi says. “He had to have several surgeries to repair a lot of the damage, but he came through it fine.”
The other Tressel
Michigan fans should enjoy this: The female penguin named after the coach isn’t exactly an honor student. Becky Ellsworth, the head keeper for the Shores department, says she’s been able to target train (teach an animal to come to a spot) all the penguins except Tressel. “She just doesn’t catch on,” Ellsworth says. Tressel also isn’t going to win any parent-of-the-year awards. She successfully laid an egg, but decided motherhood wasn’t for her and abandoned the egg after just three days, Ellsworth says.
—Dave Ghose
How to weigh a sea turtle
Weight is the most vital of all statistics for a sea turtle. “It’s really the only assessment we have as far as whether or not it’s doing OK,” says Becky Ellsworth, head keeper for the Shores department, which includes the Discovery Reef aquarium. “We want to make sure they are healthy and happy, and that’s the best judgment we have.”
But keepers can’t simply ask a sea turtle, which can weigh up to 400 pounds, to hop on a scale. Instead, they must go through a slow, laborious process that can take up to five months to perfect. Here’s how it’s done.
Step one: the target
Ellsworth and her colleagues start by getting the turtle to come to a “target,” a PVC pipe covered in red electrical tape held by a zoo worker. At first, keepers use long tongs to feed the turtle smelt, carrots, sweet potatoes and other goodies at the surface of the water. Then they introduce the pipe, just holding it next to the turtle as it eats. “The turtle sees what this is, and it’s not a scary thing. It’s just a stick in the water,” Ellsworth says.
Step two: the tap
Keepers begin to tap the turtle on its beak with the pipe right before it gets a piece of food. Eventually, the turtle begins to tap the pipe itself, receiving a treat when it does so. Using the pipe as a lure, keepers now can get the turtle to move around the tank, rewarding the animal each time it taps the target. “He knows as soon as his beak touches the target, he’s going to get a piece of food,” Ellsworth says. “That’s how we target train him.”
Step three: the net
A large net with a metal frame is sunk in the tank. Keepers then use the pipe/target to move the turtle into the net, which is attached with rope to a crane scale. “For several weeks, the turtle would just eat in the general vicinity of the net,” Ellsworth says. Slowly, keepers begin to raise the net—the first day an inch, then a couple of inches the next day and so on, always using positive reinforcement and making sure the turtle isn’t spooked. “Eventually, we are able to bring the net all the way out of the water and get a weight on the turtle,” Ellsworth says.
—Dave Ghose
The life of a zookeeper
The joys of the job are easy to see: working outside, bonding with remarkable exotic creatures. But the life of a zookeeper isn’t easy. The pay isn’t that great (a starting salary around $35,000), and the hours and conditions can be tough (working weekends and holidays, shoveling elephant waste). Columbus Monthly spoke with two keepers to find out what it’s really like to be one of the chosen few.
Adam Felts, elephants
How he got the job: This is a complete accident. I was going to school for pharmacy. Then I decided I wanted to go to vet school after pharmacy, so I started working here in the summer for experience, and it kind of sucked me in. I dropped out of pharmacy school and changed my degree to zoology.
Bonding with elephants: We do a lot of training with the elephants, but it’s actually more building relationships with them. . . . Elephant socialization is very similar to our socialization. They live in family groups. They raise calves together. They’re looking for that companionship. They’re looking for that relationship.
The February death of Coco, the patriarch of the elephant herd: Probably the hardest day of my career, probably one of the hardest in my life. He was awesome. He was tough. You walk in and you see this elephant that was just king of all kings and just helpless. It was pretty heartbreaking.
Food and waste: They eat 300 pounds of food a day. They’ll eat four or five bales of hay a day. They defecate 12 to 15 times.
Elephants aren’t for everyone: There’s a science to it, but there’s also an art. It takes a different kind of person to walk up to an [elephant] and say, “Let me see your foot.” You got to have confidence. . . . There are people who can’t hack it.
Becky Ellsworth, flamingos
Unsure about flamingos at first: I didn’t have any experience with them. Most of my undergrad work was in sharks and stingrays and sea turtles and fish. But when I first started working here, my boss kind of got me hooked on the birds. I’ve fallen in love with them more so than anything.
Getting to know flamingos: They have personalities, especially the ones we hand raise. They bond with us. We have a relationship with them their whole lives.
Training: We do some clicker training [associating a positive reinforcement such as food with a clicking sound] three times a day, go out in the yard, use the clicker. They know that’s food time. They will come over to us. They look to preen our hair. They like to be around us. We have to keep that up. We start them from a very young age. Every time we give them food, the little chicks, we click, and they start to associate us with food.
Misconceptions about the job: One of the misconceptions is that it’s all fun. It’s a lot of cleaning behind the scenes. It’s a lot of coming in in the middle of the night. It’s not all glamorous as people think it is. Yeah, we do a lot of training, and we do enrichment, and those are the moments you really bond with the animals. But the day in and day out is a lot of hard work.
Best part of the job: When I’m somewhere else, outside the zoo, and I tell them what I do, everyone says, “I love the Columbus Zoo!” You don’t get any other reaction in Columbus. How many other people can say that about where they work?
—Dave Ghose
A gratuitous Jack Hanna story
In early June, the globe-trotting Hanna, making a pit stop in Central Ohio for a few days, sat down with Columbus Monthly for a brief chat. Though he didn’t do much sitting. Hanna, dressed in his trademark safari hat and khaki shirt and shorts, greeted a reporter and a photographer warmly and then rushed them from the zoo headquarters to a new feature inside the grounds called Jack Hanna’s Base Camp, a Mongolian-style yurt filled with photographs and mementos from his career. He also radioed a zookeeper to meet him there with a cheetah.
A few minutes later, Hanna was delivering the full David Letterman treatment. After a few uneasy moments as Edward the cheetah gets used to him, Hanna starts petting the eight-month-old animal and insists the reporter join him despite nervous protestations. “This just couldn’t be a nice article if there wasn’t an animal in it,” Hanna says.
Honestly, there isn’t a good reason to speak to Hanna for this package of stories about the inner workings of the zoo. It’s been decades since he was the day-to-day manager of the institution. Yet Hanna, in reporter lingo, makes good copy. It’s always interesting to hear about his latest adventures at the far outposts of civilization: deserts, jungles, late-night television.
As usual, Hanna has been all over the place. He talks about a recent trip to South America: seeing the pink river dolphin and the giant river otter in the Amazon,
admiring the moon-like landscape of the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth. “Most people don’t even know about it,”
he says.
He just got back a week ago from a speaking tour to Italy, Israel and Egypt, where he saw firsthand the political upheaval that forced the country’s longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak from power. “Egypt was shut down, nobody at the Cairo airport,” Hanna says. “It was frightening. I went up the Suez Canal with a gunship in front of our boat.”
In a couple of days, he starts a new itinerary: Alaska, Montana, Los Angeles and Branson, Missouri (where he’s supposed to give a speech). Tigers, gorillas and revolutions don’t seem to bother him, but Hanna is worried about what he’s supposed to do in Montana: officiate at a wedding. His good friend Larry Wilson, the founder of radio powerhouse Citadel Broadcasting, asked him to do the honors at his upcoming nuptials. Hanna got ordained via the Internet for the occasion. “I have to do it,” Hanna says. “If I don’t do it, it will hurt his feelings.”
—Dave Ghose
Hanging out with a vet
Charlotte the kangaroo is unhappy, squirming and fighting. Her broken left arm is wrapped in bandages, and Dr. Michael Barrie wants to see if it’s healing properly. A vet tech holds the
45-pound animal’s head. Barrie suggests loosening his grip. “Sometimes less is more,” Barrie says. The tech does as he’s told, and the kangaroo suddenly calms down.
One of three veterinarians at the zoo, Barrie has a fascinating and challenging job. He and his two colleagues (another full-timer and a resident) care for an extraordinary collection of animals that range from five-ton Asian elephants to tiny feather-tailed gliders (an Australian possum that weighs less than an ounce). In mid August, Columbus Monthly spent a few hours with Barrie to see what the job is like.
In the treatment room of the zoo’s animal hospital, Barrie waits for a dose of ketamine, a common animal anesthetic, to knock Charlotte out. The effect isn’t instantaneous, and Barrie and his colleague Dr. Holly Peters debate whether Charlotte needs another shot. When dealing with animals, especially exotic ones, flexibility and patience are key. “They don’t follow the script,” Barrie says.
After Charlotte drifts off (without another dose) and Barrie cuts off the bandage, he carries her to the radiology room down the hall. An X-ray reveals the break, which occurred about three weeks ago, is healing well, but not completely. Barrie tells Peters to put a cast back on for another week or so.
Barrie’s next stop is the zoo’s North America exhibit. Living inside the safe, predator-free confines of a zoo, some animals grow older than you’d expect to see in the wild and, as a result, struggle with age-related ailments. The North America exhibit, for instance, is “kind of like a geriatric ward,” Barrie says, because of its large number of elderly animals.
Zookeeper Lori Monska greets Barrie. “Still not herself?” Barrie asks Monska, who’s monitoring Lulu, a lethargic 13-year-old prong-horned antelope. A recent blood test suggests Lulu may have kidney disease. Monska and another keeper, Dan Nellis, hold Lulu as Barrie takes a blood sample and injects water into her to prevent dehydration. No sedation is required because of Lulu’s age and amenability. Monska’s presence helps a lot, too. A keeper for 27 years, she’s been Lulu’s caregiver since she arrived at the zoo.
Next, Barrie visits Bubba, a brown bear with a bump on his nose. Barrie checked the bump—possibly a bee sting—earlier in the day, but Monska says it’s gotten larger since. Barrie agrees. “That’s about twice as big as when I noticed it,” he says, observing it through a fence as Bubba lies on the ground. Bubba also recently had some stomach problems. The vet told Monska to give him Pepcid following a bout of vomiting. “It’s amazing what we give our animals,” Monska says with a laugh.
Monska’s last patient for Barrie is Edward, a 13-year-old moose with bad knees and worn-down teeth. “Easy does it. You can do it, Edward. Good boy, Edward,” Monska says, leading the moose to Barrie. Age is catching up with Edward, who’s on a special diet as a result of his bad teeth. Barrie gave him a new medication a couple of days ago. “I’m thinking it’s helping, but it’s not going to cure him,” he says. “We were just talking about whether more exercise might be better for him. We’re going to try him out in the yard.”
Euthanasia is a possibility if his health continues to disintegrate. “It’s one of the tools a veterinarian has to stop suffering,” Barrie says. But that doesn’t mean it’s an easy choice, especially to the keepers who’ve become so attached to Edward. “He’s got us all under his hoof, so to speak,” says Nellis, the other North America keeper.
Barrie hops into his van and heads to the African Forest exhibit to check on Sasha, an Angolan colobus monkey who recently was tested for tuberculosis, a potentially devastating disease for primates. The assignment seems pretty simple. Barrie needs to see if Sasha’s eyelid is swollen. If it is, then that indicates the monkey might have TB. (The zoo regularly tests all its primates for the disease.)
But Sasha doesn’t make it easy. Absorbed in eating a monkey biscuit (a favorite snack), he refuses to look at Barrie. “If I throw something at him, that would be a bad example,” he says with a laugh.
After a keeper gives him a handful of peanuts, Barrie climbs down some stairs to get closer to the exhibit. The vet tosses peanuts through the mesh, attracting pretty much every monkey but Sasha. Finally, Sasha notices the tasty treats and approaches Barrie, offering a glimpse of his eyelid. Nothing seems out of the ordinary.
—Dave Ghose
Love connections
The Columbus Zoo’s greatest breeding achievement was surprisingly easy. Nearly 55 years ago, a keeper, acting on a hunch, put two gorillas together in the same cage against his boss’s orders. After two or three secret encounters, Millie, an 8-year-old gorilla, got pregnant and eight months later, the Columbus Zoo celebrated the birth of Colo, the world’s first captive-born gorilla.
Since then, the zoo’s breeding program has made monumental leaps. Some 26 animals were born at the zoo since 2010, including two bonobos, three North American river otters, one western lowland gorilla and three kiwis. (The kiwis are an achievement nearly a decade in the making.) Keepers no longer rely on hunches. To keep the babies coming, they consider diet, social structure, genetics, mating rituals, the size and layout of an exhibit, even something as seemingly innocuous as the amount of light an exhibit receives. During the zoo’s popular Wildlights program, keepers board up the exhibit that features Pallas cats, a small animal from Mongolia. Too much light can keep the females from going into their estrous cycles.
Sometimes a keeper may even act like a dating coach. Dusty Lombardi, the zoo’s vice president of animal care, says the male gorilla Annaka’s aggressive behavior used to upset females. He wouldn’t give proper vocalizations (loud grunts) before he attempted to mate, resulting in females suppressing ovulation. Keepers fixed the problem with positive reinforcement, praising him when he acted properly—appropriate movement and vocalization. They also cut back on the corrections since, like a small child, Annaka enjoyed the attention, even if it was negative.
Matchmakers aren’t above a little trickery, too. A few years back, the zoo stationed mirrors in the flamingo exhibit to make the colony seem larger to its occupants than it really was. Flamingoes feel safer—and more likely to breed—if their numbers are greater. The mirrors helped, Lombardi says, but they weren’t enough. Keepers realized the colony’s sex ratio was off. “We found out we had a lot more males than we had females, and the males were sort of squabbling and always fighting,” Lombardi says. Sometimes, the males would end up pairing off with each other. “And they’re not going to produce anything,” Lombardi says. Now, the colony is more balanced and enjoying a record year—the fifth flamingo chick of the year hatched in mid August.
Despite all the advances, however, luck remains important. The zoo used to have a pair of sun bears that refused to breed; they seemed to dislike one another, Lombardi says. Then the zoo got a new pair—Edwina and Ralphie—and fireworks went off from the moment they met, with Edwina getting pregnant twice so far. “These two just like each other,” Lombardi says.
—Dave Ghose
What happens to the dead animals?
Dealing with death is a touchy subject. And for the folks at the zoo, this holds especially true. Officials are relatively mum on the protocol for handling dead animals.
“In regards to what happens to the animals when they die (of course they all go to heaven), this is an area we don’t like to discuss,” writes zoo spokeswoman Patty Peters via e-mail. “We are charged with protecting animals throughout their life and even after they die. We don’t want to provide too much information that might result in someone wanting to locate an animal for their body parts.”
Asked if this is a common occurrence, she replies, “We haven’t had any issues here, but are asked the question every time we have a high profile loss. Most are just curious inquiries, but a few have been from taxidermists and collectors.”
It is for this reason that buried zoo animals are not marked with stones or memorials. “These aren’t humans,” says Steve Feldman, spokesman for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which sets accreditation standards for most of the top zoos in North America. “You don’t want people hunting for those places and digging where they shouldn’t be.”
Death is a natural part of life and comes with its benefits, according to Feldman. “Almost everything we know about animals—their biology, physiology, reproduction—comes from zoo animals that have died,” he says. “We need to understand why they died so we can contribute to the body of knowledge about those animals.”
To do this, scientists at zoos across the country perform what’s called a necropsy (the animal equivalent of an autopsy). Additionally, officials preserve bio-facts—bones, teeth, pelts, anything, Feldman says, that can help the scientific community as well as the general public learn about that particular animal.
Before a creature is buried or cremated, Feldman notes the pivotal impact its death provides on zookeepers’ general ability to care for animals while they’re alive. “After a sad event,” he says, “those animals can still contribute to veterinary medicine and the advancement of science.”
—Ben Zenitsky
Zoo facts
9,445 animals in the zoo’s collection.
3 miles of earthworms (if lined up end to end) eaten by an adult kiwi bird per year.
2.4 million people visited the zoo and Zoombezi Bay Waterpark last year, a record.
260 days spent on the road by Jack Hanna in 2010.
2 tons of bananas consumed by four adult moose per year, more than all the zoo’s primates combined.
$19.6 million collected from Franklin County taxpayers
last year, 34 percent of total revenue.
Sources: Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, Jack Hanna.
