Build Me an Ark

"So never mind the darkness, we still can find a way,

'Cause nothin' lasts forever, even cold November rain."

- Guns n Roses, November Rain

There's all sorts of natural disasters which a zookeeper has to cope with, some of which I've never had to deal with (at least a major one) - fire, earthquake - others I have - blizzard, severe storm, drought.  Perhaps the natural disaster I've dealt with the most often, and which stresses me out the most, is flooding.  Flooding poses the same risk of damage and loss of life - human and animal - as the others, of course.  It also has a heightened risk of escape.  Storms and earthquakes can also damage cages and allow animals to escape, it is true, but floods have an inconvenient ability to fill in moats and raise and overflow the water features of exhibits.  What once was a barrier keeping the animal in its enclosure suddenly becomes a highway that leads the animal out of its enclosure.

I'm a pretty poor swimmer, and drowning has always been a possibility that scares me.  That's something I think a lot about when I'm running around a zoo in shin-deep water.  It's something I really think about when I find myself sharing water with an animal and I know that animal is definitely in its element whereas I am not.  On dry land, even a fairly large alligator or crocodile is pretty easy to work around safely.  When all of the dry land in its exhibit is now drowned beneath the rains, suddenly the odds aren't quite in your favor anymore, and it's amazing how little water it takes even a very large alligator to hide in.  Leaving said alligator alone, unfortunately, was not an option for safety reasons during the flood.

In one of the most startling flood incidents I had, a sudden rainstorm flooded the (normally dry) moat of our capybara exhibit.  I ran to check on them and couldn't see any of them in the habitat.  Panicking, I hopped the fence and splashed into their moat, chest deep on me (not my better idea).  The second I did, the capybaras all surfaced in the water all around me, bobbing to the surface just feet away.  They seemed to be loving their pool.  I wasn't loving the fact that the surface of the water was now level with the top of the moat.  Had they been so inclined, they could have hopped right out of the moat, walked across the path, jumped into the nearby creek, and swam off into the distance.

That creek, however, was also a natural component of a few hoofstock exhibits, and in its swollen state those animals found themselves standing on vanishingly small islands in their now-flooded paddocks.  After careful discussion, we decided to open the gates to the paddock and let the animals that couldn't be caught up and relocated just roam the zoo at large (the perimeter gates were closed) and move to higher ground.  When the waters receded, we were able to use food to coax them back to their exhibit.

The more I look back on it, it seems like we actually had a lot of crazy floods at that zoo.  Floods that the old timers there said had once been once a decade were now occurring two or three times a summer.  I'm sure that there's no possible climate change implications in that, of course...