Pretty but Perilous

There's more than one kind of "Frozen Zoo" out there... and this past week, the weather gave my coworkers and I the literal version.

We were forced to close for three days due to the icy conditions.  Now that the COVID-19 shutdowns have rolled back, I'd been hoping for a nice, mild fall that would let us make up some of the attendance that we lost from the spring.  So much for that... and it's not even winter yet.

The zoo is always a pretty place, in different ways in different seasons of the year, but there is a surrealism in working when it's closed for icy weather.  You can glide along empty paths, crunching through snow, and enjoying the incongruous sight of zebras, kangaroos, or other animals strolling through the snow before meandering back into their barns.  Then, of course, there are the real winter-weather animals, such as polar bears, at home in their element (seldom penguins, though - the majority of penguins in US zoos are the warm-weather species, such as the African penguin, and zoos that do house cold-weather species, such as the king penguin, generally keep them indoors).  The snow is a maze of tracks, and you can observe the numbers of squirrels, rabbits, and other small animals that meandered the paths before you.  It's equally fun to take two steps from a subzero landscape into an indoor tropical rainforest, with birds swooping overhead and monkeys chattering in the branches, having to wait for your glasses to unfog before you can see anything.

All of it is enhanced by the silence, the emptiness, as you walk down paths that just a few weeks ago were crowded... or, as crowded as things are allowed to get these days.

Of course, there's the reason that we're closed, which is visitor safety.  It's been a hard enough year, financially - no need to add lawsuits from the public to our 2020 burdens.  We have enough trouble with keepers falling.  I feel like every other day I'm getting sent some notice or another from higher-ups over the work email, exhorting us to be careful.  "Walk like a penguin," they say.   It's easy to get distracted by the beauty and lose track of your footing, which can send you careening across the black ice.

Which, of course, brings us to the one good thing about being closed during icy weather - there are no guests present to watch as I slide and face-plant in a snowbank for the third time that morning.