The Keeper of Small Things

When we think of zoo animals, we most often think of the biggest animals - elephants, giraffes, bears, rhinos, big cats, and the like.  These are among the most popular of animals with visitors.  In many ways, their presence or absence is what is used by members of the public to determine if a facility is a "real" zoo or not.  I know that was my thought process as a kid.  If a zoo didn't have hippos, tigers, and a half dozen other ABC species, it was a kid's zoo.

Over the year, my mindset has changed.  Part of it has been me developing more appreciation for smaller, less flashy animals.  Part of it, surprisingly, has been a rethinking of the visitor experience.

As we advance animal welfare at our institutions, that often means bigger exhibits for animals, which means bigger habitats.  As a result, many zoos have fewer habitats for large animals - maybe a zoo would have had five species of bear once, but now have one or two in that same space.  Larger habitats mean more natural experiences and better chances to express natural behavior, which is great.  The downside is that if have fewer animals and a certain number of them are off-exhibit or out of view for any reason, the visitor experience declines.  This was especially notable over the last year when avian influenza caused many zoos to pull their birds (flamingos, penguins, and a handful of other birds break into the mammal-heavy category of "zoo stars"), leaving many empty displays.  A guest may walk around the zoo all day and see very few animals.

On the other hand, if you go the opposite route and take those five bear habitats and give them to smaller animals - meerkats, wallabies, red pandas, anteaters, and muntjacs, for example - you have five habitats instead of one.  It creates more diversity and more opportunities for visitors to experience active, engaging animals.  If the meerkats are off-exhibit for habitat repairs, or the red pandas are in their dens because it's too hot outside, visitors can see the other animals.  You aren't putting all of your eggs in one basket, or in this case, exhibit.

This is even more obvious in animal houses.  Except for reptile houses and aquariums, many of these buildings - bird houses, small mammal houses, primate houses - are fading away.  There are arguments in favor of that - more space, more outdoor access, greater focus on geographic exhibits - so I'm not too surprised.  Still, I do miss the excitement of wall-to-wall animals, one right after another.  I enjoy looping around these buildings with the stimulation of seeing one animal right after another, never knowing what you're going to see next.

Not surprisingly, the smaller you go, the more animals that you can comfortably fit in a space (and then having the possibility of multi-story habitats, seen in aquariums but not in many other animal collections).  When you factor in invertebrates (the most numerous of animals, by far), smaller (re: non-shark) fish, amphibians, and smaller reptiles, birds, and mammals, you can have an entire zoo with dozens of species in the amount of space that would otherwise make one decent giraffe habitat.

When I was a kid, I loved hippos more than any other animal and wanted to be a hippo keeper.  Today, I think I could build an entire world-class zoo without a single animal that I couldn't pick up myself.