Description:
Eddie Witte talks about his career at the Oklahoma City Zoo.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Eddie Witte
Interviewer: Amy Stephens
AS: Alright, this is Amy Stephens and I am interviewing Eddie Witte today at the Oklahoma City Zoo. It is September 16, 2009 and we are going to focus on his 25 year career at the zoo. So Eddie give me your full name, your age and your birthplace.
EW: My name is Eddie Witte. I was born up in far northeast Oklahoma in Miami, Oklahoma, I grew up there all of my life and my age is 47.
AS: So you have always lived in Oklahoma?
EW: Always lived in Oklahoma uh huh.
AS: Ok, and how did you get into this job at the zoo?
EW: I was going to OSU and they had zoo biology which is a class that is taught here at the zoo through OSU at the time and just dealt with how to deal with zoos and while I was there they had a position open in the antelope department for part time, and I was hired part time the first week and then I was hired full time the second week.
AS: You must have done a good job….
EW: They were impressed like, I knew what the animals were. Which back then, 25 years ago they were hiring people off of ranches and stuff like that. It wasn’t like it is now where they are requiring degrees. So I already had a knowledge of animals and what the different species were and stuff like that before I started.
AS: What was working in antelope like?
EW: Back then it was kind of a combination of a zoo and rodeo. Um, our collection was huge back then, where we have like 3 or 4 animals in an exhibit now, we would have 20 to 25 and the animals were all a lot larger. We had things like elands, gemsbuck, nyala, gaur, ankole cattle. Just a whole range of stuff and like I said there wasn’t just a pair or a trio, there was like 17 elands in an exhibit so they were dirt, you know, all you did was basically feed, clean and take care of babies, or tag babies because we were having babies all the time back then.
AS: So why has that changed?
EW: Um a lot of those species were kind of phased out, they were a more common species, so they kind of went to, and plus our exhibits just looked horrible, they were, whenever you have got that many animals in the exhibit they were nothing but dirt, and so they got more desirable species that we could work with like the time we had just gotten the bontebok, the bongo and things like that and those were really rare animals back then and uh, so we traded out species…….
AS: So….
EW: And got stuff that we could work with better.
AS: Who was zoo director when you started?
EW: Lawrence Curtis.
AS: Ok, and was he big hoof stock guy? Was that part of it?
EW: Lawrence was a little bit of everything and the Oklahoma City Zoo was always known for its hoof stock collection and I mean we were the biggest producer of gaur, markhor, ibex, that was like that for years and I just kind of caught the tail end of that. And so we were just known for having a big incredible hoof stock collection. We had cape buffalo, um, white eared kobs, antelope, everything and most of those are not here anymore.
AS: So where did you go after you left antelopes?
EW: I was in the antelopes for 3 years and they had a position open in the bird department and so I applied for that and got to transfer over to the bird department and I was there for about 5 years and then they had another position come open in the Children’s Zoo for supervisor. So I applied for that and I got the supervisor of the Children’s Zoo and I was there for about 5 years and then I transferred as a supervisor to the giraffe area and was there for a number of years again and then I transferred again back into the bird department as a supervisor and that’s where I have been for like the last 3 or 4 years.
AS: Why birds?
EW: I like birds. Birds are a little bit more challenging, a lot of your hoofs, mammal species, hoof stock and stuff like that, it’s very repetitious, at least in my opinion. You put a boy and a girl together and it’s kind of um, you get babies. You know, bird department it’s a lot of exhibit work. It’s a lot of the plant stuff and you have to have that environment for a lot of these bird species to breed, and so it’s not just putting a boy and a girl together and sticking them in an exhibit, it’s making sure that they have the right kind of cover, the right nesting material, it’s just a lot more challenging at least for me.
AS: In the previous interview with Dean Rakestraw, he said that the job was really, really physical in the beginning. Have you seen a change in that?
EW: You know, it is a physical job, we are outside no matter if it’s a heat index of 112 or if it’s -5 with an ice storm. You know, antelope and the hoof stock exhibits were a lot more physical because of the size of animals that you were dealing with when you restraining or moving, hauling hay, you know, doing all of that stuff, bird department is not nearly as physical but then again there is a lot of bending over, you know, you almost have to be a contortionist to get in those hallway cages in the pachyderm exhibit. Because we have them planned up well, we’ve got protein and all that, so when you are trying to work in there you are bending, stretching, you know, so I mean it is a physical job.
AS: Good exercise.
EW: It is good exercise because you are on your feet all time and you are moving all the time.
AS: Well what is a typical day for you now, now that you are back in birds?
EW: A typical day now is um, just kind of seeing what we need to get done that day, you know, the good thing that I hear about is that no two days are ever kind of alike. You don’t know what you are going to walk into every morning, you can have plans for what you are going to do and they just all go out the window as soon as you walk in the door, you know we... I help all the [unintelligible], and cleaning the exhibits and then that’s what we usually do first. We will do our head count in the morning just to make sure that everybody is ok, and everybody is where they are supposed to be and then we will go ahead and get everybody fed right away because birds have a higher metabolism, so they need to be fed right away. And then we just kind of go from there, if we are doing projects, meetings, whatever we are doing, then we will just take it from there.
AS: Do you find yourself more drawn to certain birds or species…..
EW: Well the joke around here is that I am like chickens of the world is my exhibit that I want to do…….
AS: I have heard that.
EW: I like small birds. I’m kind of different on that, a lot of people like the cranes, ducks, raptors, I like passerines, I like finches, I like the little song birds, there is something about something that is only 3 inches long that when you are near it’s nest and it is just going at you, yelling at you to get away it just kind of appeals to me.
AS: So when you went into school your intension was to work at a zoo?
EW: Yeah I mean…..
AS: Did you have this passion for animals?
EW: I always have from the time that I can remember I grew up having all kinds of chickens, ducks, geese, my parents were very, very tolerant of stuff, they never knew what I was going to walk in the house with next. I always knew that I wanted to do something with animals. I thought at one time that I wanted to be a vet but I worked for a really incredible vet in Miami, Oklahoma by the name of Charles Waterson, who wanted me to know exactly what I was getting into, so if he would get a call at three o’clock in the morning in December, a cold day to go pull out a calf, he would call me and go if this is what you want to do, this is where you are going. So, I kind of learned that yeah some of this is great, some of this is not so great, but once I saw the zoo biology class and once I got here, I just knew that this is what I wanted to do.
AS: So what is your absolute favorite thing?
EW: I like exhibit work. I like, like when we did Oklahoma Trails and the aviary over there. I like just going in there and just making an exhibit, planning it out, putting the plant material where you want it. Pearl our horticulture curator, she was great she just said go down to the ware……, I mean to the uh, greenhouse and pick out what you want. They put the trees in and everything else I got to do myself.
AS: Do you change those often?
EW: Not like things like the Oklahoma Aviary. We will add and subtract do that kind of stuff. The pachyderm hallway, the smaller exhibits where, people can get close to and the birds are more confined, we have to change those out a lot more often because the protein and stuff will get old and you can tell because you are closer to it, but exhibit work is just the thing for me.
AS: What is an event that has happened here at the zoo, good or bad that really affected you?
EW: A couple of things, one was when I was in the Children’s Zoo as the supervisor, we were raising baby gorillas in the nursery a lot, and our last one that I participated in was a little boy named Mojo, who was born here by a female at the time who was like the oldest female to ever give birth. She had given birth like a year prior and it looked like she was taking care of the baby great, and then we found out that she was not nursing the baby. She was not producing milk and the baby died. So we just decided that the next time if she got pregnant again, because she was a very genetically valuable animal, wild caught, never produced except for that one baby and that was in England at the time, that we really needed this baby for genetics, so then she gave birth, the day she gave birth I went over there, they darted mom so we could grab the baby. Went in there and grabbed him, a little boy, healthy and all that. We were raising him in the nursery and he was probably a month or two old, I can’t remember exactly how old, and he started getting a descended stomach and some other symptoms, and we had our vet look at him and it came out that he had leukemia, and it’s like the first ever recorded case of leukemia that I know of at the time…..
AS: Oh I didn’t know that.
EW: ...in a baby gorilla, and so we had a great oncologist and I wish that I could remember this guy’s name, he worked at Children’s Hospital, and he was just incredible, and he worked with us. It was very challenging because baby gorillas, babies, human babies only grab with their front, their arms and hands, well baby gorillas grab with all four appendages. So it makes changing diapers great, when you think that you have two arms under control and then the baby grabs the dirty diaper with its feet, but he was hooked up to iv’s all the time and just trying to get him to not pull out iv’s and stuff, especially at three o’clock in the morning when you are sitting in the nursery trying to stay awake and trying to keep him occupied. For everything that he did and everything that we tried, he still didn’t make it, and that was kind of a hard thing to deal with, it was basically, for me it was like a young child, because basically up until they get to be about a year old they have kind of the same developmental things like a human child, and then gorillas will slow down and humans will go on and develop farther, but that was a tough one. And the other thing that really affected me was I had just left the Children’s Zoo for about 4 or 5 months whenever we had a keeper down there that got attacked by the Malayan Tapir, and that was tough also because I knew this girl from college, and we went to school together and that was a hard thing to deal with also.
AS: Do you ever stay in touch with her?
EW: Not now
AS: Well so apparently this job is emotional, it’s not just I go to work………
EW: Yeah, as much as you try to separate yourself, because these are wild animals, you know, I tell my keepers don’t get attached, you know, because if we need to ship something out then we will ship it out, if that’s what needs to happen for the betterment of genetics or and, you know, you still find yourself kind of getting attached to things, not matter what you do or what kind of persona that you try to put on.
AS: Well you got promoted to supervisor, why do you think? What are your management skills that caused that?
EW: One, I know my animals, I’m good at exhibits and I care for my people. You know that if my people need something then that’s my top priority, it’s time to take care of my people and I think that, that’s the way it should be.
AS: Yeah. So what is the name of a zoo employee that really had an effect on you, maybe it was a mentor or something.
EW: There is actually a couple. One is a zoo employee and one of them is a volunteer that we had out here. The employee was Ralph Harris. He hired me whenever I got hired, and Ralph had just gone through a whole bunch of stuff here at the zoo. The director at the time, they didn’t get along. Ralph was curator at one time and got demoted to supervisor of the antelope area and that was tough on Ralph and he had a hard time, when I first started he kind of just didn’t do anything, but I saw him go ahead over the years and change and became the Ralph that we all knew, and what most people knew of Ralph, and that kind of taught me that no matter what happens to you, you can see it and overcome it and do your job and be happy and, you know, put that behind you and I think that is a great lesson to learn. The other person was the queen of hearts for Halloween, and I can’t remember…….
AS: Ilene Hoskins.
EW: Ilene Hoskins. This lady was incredible. She kind of taught me lessons on a different level. This lady had a hard time walking, she always used a walker, she had, I don’t know what her medical condition was but I just know that she had a real hard time being mobile but, yet she would come out here all the time and it would take her a half hour to a hour to get to the great escape. She would go down there almost, at least a few times a week if not more and be a docent, down in the great escape and that kind of taught me that no matter what happens to you, you keep going and you keep moving and you do the things that you want to.
AS: Awe, that’s nice to hear. I love Ilene. Do you have any distinct memories about, and these are some of our main characters, Judy the elephant, Matilda the hippo, or Carmichael the polar bear?
EW: Carmichael was already gone whenever I got here…..
AS: Ok.
EW: So I saw the exhibit that he was kept in at one time, and heard a few things about Carmichael but nothing really that comes to mind. Judy the elephant, she was here when I got here. It’s the first time that I had ever stood next to an elephant and, because since I was in the bird department we share an office with the pachyderm building. If they were short handed at the time and this was a long, long time ago, they would ask us to go help with the elephants, and it’s kind of intimidating to stand next to something that is that big and, her foot is bigger than what you are. I just did not feel comfortable and she would look at you, and Judy had a history of every once in a while of just kind of whacking people. Not often but just enough that, you know... and plus just standing there next to something that big that could just step on you and just, you know, was kind of a thing, and I was here the day that Judy died and that’s just not something that you see every day, in trying to deal with, it was just a very interesting day.
AS: How did people respond that day?
EW: The good thing that the zoo did was they sent the primary keepers that were the pachyderm keepers home that day….
AS: Really?
EW: Yeah because they had taken care of their own animals that day, rhinos, hippos, Tanzi, we still had Tanzi the elephant, the African, at the time, and of course we had to do a necropsy on Judy, and luckily we had a bunch of people from OSU vet school come down and because it was a monumental task, it took all day just to do the necropsy and to get her buried and out of the barn because she died in the stall and so that was a very interesting day. Very non forgettable, it’s not every day that you help do an autopsy on an elephant.
AS: So did you help with it?
EW: Yeah, I mean we had keepers all over the place because I mean you have something that weighs 8,000 pounds that’s in a stall, how do you get it out? You know so we had to work all day helping them do the autopsy and dispose of her body and she is buried here on zoo grounds.
AS: I have heard that rumor, but nobody can confirm.
EW: No, she’s buried over back behind [unintelligible], in between [unintelligible] buildings and the golf course, and so that’s where she was placed at the time.
AS: So the people that worked with her the most didn’t have to witness that?
EW: No they didn’t have to be there, as soon as they got through taking care of their other animals then they left for the day and were gone, and the ones of us that could have a little more detachment for lack of a better word, stayed and did what we needed to do. Matilda the hippo was here. Her and Norman, um, I was here whenever she had her last baby, you know, and was here whenever Matilda was shipped out. That was kind of a sad day also, you know, something that has been here for that long and that old, you know, to leave. But she went, and unfortunately she died in transit, which was just an unfortunate, it happens you know, if you are dealing with live things, then things are going to happen.
AS: Why do you think that people are so attached to these two animals?
EW: They were icons that people could relate to. I mean I still get people that come here to the zoo and say that I helped give the dimes that bought Judy the elephant, or I remember that song that, that lady wrote about I want a hippopotamus for Christmas, and so we still have people that remember those days that come to our zoo and talk about them.
AS: Do you think that we have any animals now that are going to be that iconic?
EW: Actually no I don’t think that we do. I think that whenever you get the public involved in something like that, that’s what makes an iconic animal. I mean Will and Wiley, the grizzlies, people know them but I don’t think that they have that sense of ownership that people had when they were giving their pennies or they are buying the song that helps pay for the hippo and stuff like that and I think that if you don’t have that personal attachment of thinking that I helped do this, then I don’t think that the animals are going to be iconic. Certain ones will be remembered but not like those guys.
AS: Well and the way that zoos treat animals and exhibit them are different too……
EW: Oh yeah.
AS: You have probably seen big changes…..
EW: Oh yeah. Enrichment is not even a word that was ever mentioned whenever I first started getting here. We were doing training but we were not calling it operate conditioning, we were not calling it anything, you know, we were teaching things, how to shift and all that, so we were doing that even though it wasn’t a conscious thing that we were doing, but enrichment was not even something that was even thought about when I first started, especially in the hoof stock area, because it was just so big and you know, there was just not a lot that you could do at the time. So we have made lots of strides, we exhibit stuff better um, we take care of the mental needs as well as the physical needs and, it’s changed to, you know, lots of change especially to bird collections. Back when I first started you would get these surplus lists from these people importing wild birds and it would have, it was just like going to the store, I’ll take 2 of this, 5 of this and you know, and now days our species are disappearing, we are not breeding things, if we don't breed them we can’t import them and so every year it seems like we are getting less and less species that we can work with and unless we can learn how to change that, I think that we are all going to be starting to get the same type of exhibits around the country.
AS: What’s the neatest breeding program that you have been part of?
EW: Good question. I was participating in the first rearing of the secretary birds here at the Oklahoma City, us and Abilene kind of went, they were close, I can’t really say who was really first, but at the same year we raised some and they raised some and, we hand raised ours and those were kind of fun. Flamingos are a lot of fun. This is our third consecutive year that I have raised flamingos and they are a lot of work, they are a pain in the butt, but they are really cute fun babies, you have to walk them and they take off, and they are always talking, flamingos are fun.
AS: So, for people that don’t know what it is like to work with flamingos, what’s the process that you go through?
EW: Uh, on hand raising?
AS: Uh huh.
EW: On hand raising we will get those eggs and uh, you hatch them out and you are starting out, you are making these, what they eat is disgusting gruel mixture that is chopped up smelt, Gerber’s rice baby cereal, krill, I can’t remember what else, anyway it makes this brown gruel that we, have to tube the babies. You can use one of two ways, you can either dribble it into their mouths, which takes forever or you can pass tubes down their throat going into their stomach and just inject it with a syringe, time wise it’s much more efficient, especially when you’re dealing like with one year we had 11 babies and we have 8 this year. It’s not, it’s the only way you can do it and have time to do it. But you are having to, they have different stages that you start them off in the isolates until they are like a week old, and then they go to the other breeder boxes then they have to go to the pool room and then we have to, then they can go out to the main exhibit. But they have to be fed like 5 times a day plus a night feeding when they first hatch out. The thing is that you have not just, all the babies don’t hatch out at the same day, but you will have them weeks apart so you will have some of them, and plus you’ll have different concentrations of formula. So you may have, when they first hatch out we give them 25% formula, 75% water, and then it will go 40% formula, 50, 60, 75, to 100. So you will have babies on every concentration of formula. You will have babies at different times of feeding. You have some babies that are being walked, and some babies that are not being walked. We have to walk the babies twice a day just so that their legs will develop right and get their exercise. So, like I said they are a lot of work but thank goodness that they are fun.
AS: Is this kind of process been documented now or are you just kind of learning as you go or……
EW: You know, they had raised a few flamingos in other places because you know, zoos are great, we don’t try to hide information, so if something works we are willing to give it to anybody else so we had some hand rearing protocols from Sedgwick County Zoo, other places, and we kind of modified that to do it our self, but it’s right now, knock on wood, flamingos are kind of down, we have done so much that we know what we are doing. We still have our hiccups of course, you know, like I said, they are living things, but we have got flamingos down. I just hope I haven’t jinxed us now.
AS: So what are the birds that still need some work around here?
EW: Oh, there are always birds that need work. One of the things that we would love to breed is our Andean Condors, our cinereous vultures. The thing is that these birds are reaching the end of their lives, some of them have been here since the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and they are just getting old, you know, we will probably just become like an assisted living center to some degree, and it’s a problem that we have, you can’t turn over generations. You have got healthy older birds that won’t breed, but yet you have to wait until their life passes before you can bring in younger ones to help bring in new generations, but I mean I could probably name 15-20 different things, [unintelligible], rebill hornbills, waterfowl needs work because a lot of zoos are not breeding waterfowl anymore, I mean it’s, it’s getting to where it could get seriously depleted of numbers of species.
AS: Do you have any plans for getting new species in?
EW: You know right now we don’t, we are trying to pair up things that we have. If something falls in our lap that is irresistible of course we are going to get a new species, but we try to have an idea of what we want to work with and right now our exhibits are full and unless you have a place to put something, it’s hard to bring something else in.
AS: Now Steve Wiley a big birder….
EW: A big birder.
AS: One of the former zoo directors, have you seen a change in bird collection since he is no longer here?
EW: Yeah Wiley, he, Steve was a nice guy. He was big into waterfowl and cranes. We had ducks everywhere and we had cranes in every lot, and to be honest the bird collection was a lot bigger and more diverse back then, but that goes back to being, that was kind of the end of the days when it was a shopping list, I’ll take 2 of these and 5 of those kind of things, and now days it’s just hard to find stuff, some things if they aren’t being bred, they are not being imported, they are just disappearing. So yeah our collections are smaller, our collection is not as diverse, but that’s the reason why, because there is not the opportunities that we had back then.
AS: What is the biggest change that you would like to see at the zoo?
EW: Biggest change, honestly I would like to see the atmosphere change as far as to employees, you know, I always felt like they know that we want to do this, you know, so employee concerns are not as high up as what I think they should be, it’s improved but I think that we can still make progress on that.
AS: What’s the morale like? You have seen so many stages of employees?
EW: Rollercoaster…..
AS: Yeah.
EW: I mean that over the 25 years we have had our ups and we have had our downs. I think that right now we are kind of a little bit down. I think that will change in time. Yeah I kind of look at the zoo as being a living creature of on its own. You have your good days, your bad days, your good periods, your bad periods, and that’s just the way life goes.
AS: Do you have a favorite exhibit out here? It doesn’t have to be birds.
EW: I think that we have some incredible exhibits out here. I think that the great escape was planned very well. I think it’s one that other people have copied. I think that’s a great exhibit. You know, it’s tough. Some things like DMA is a nice exhibit. It’s small, but it’s a workable aviary. I think that I like the way that we are going with exhibits. We are going more zoogeographic now. There is nothing wrong with having a taxonomic group where all the cats are in one place, where the bears are all in one place, but I kind of like the zoogeographic feel like we have with Oklahoma Trails, where people actually get to look at what all happens in a certain area. I think that they learn more of what life is like when you see the prey, the predators, the birds, everything that comes from that area. People get a wider view of what this particular spot was like.
AS: Have you seen a change in visitors over the years?
EW: Other than more and more?
AS: Yeah.
EW: Yeah our attendance each year keeps growing. You know not really, well I say that, I think that as the years go by people are more aware of the world and issues that we are dealing with and so I think that they are paying more attention. Back then, back when I started in the early 80’s it was a place where people would come out and just kind of have fun. It still is a destination, a place where people have fun. But I think that people are learning more than what they used to back then, and I think that we are teaching them a lot more now than what we did back then.
AS: Really? Interesting. Since you have been here so long what keeps you interested and motivated?
EW: You know it’s one of those things, like I said, you don’t know what you are walking into every morning. It’s not the same job day after day after day. You do have some things that you do consistently like feeding, head count, cleaning exhibits, but you are always getting new things in or you have new, somebody will learn something different so you have to try to implement that and see if that will work here. It’s one of those, it’s a great combination of mental and physical, you’re not stuck behind a desk, you’re not, you know, just doing the same thing no matter what it may be. It’s a very, varied job. You’re doing animal work, you’re doing plant work, you’re doing custodian work because you’re helping clean up the zoo and stuff like that. You’re doing horticulture, I mean it’s just mechanical things, you’re trying to fix things, so it’s really challenging on how to figure out how to do things, how to outsmart the animals sometimes.
AS: Right.
EW: Because you will have things that happen like a porcupine that pulls off a grate cover off of an exhibit, and they have not messed with it the two years it has been in the exhibit and it’s like well that’s interesting that, you know, all of the sudden she wants to do that, so you are trying to figure out, and every time you do an exhibit you are trying to make sure that you are trying to outsmart the animal so it doesn’t do what it’s not supposed to do.
AS: That just happened a couple of weeks ago…
EW: Yeah.
AS: How did you get her out?
EW: We knew the animal very well. She will sell her soul for a piece of corn. So she was in the heater vent in the building, and what we did is just put a board, we took the vent cover, well the vent cover was already off because that’s how she got in, but we just took a big 1” x 12” and put that up there and put it across some perching and put it up to the door and took an ear of corn and she smelled it and she just followed it out and we were able to put the vent cover back and we put the corn in a crate and she crawled into the crate and it was over.
AS: Well you make that sound so easy.
EW: It, some things are easy if you stop and think about them and some things no matter what you do it’s just, you’re having, like I said, you are just having to wing it sometimes……
AS: What are some of the escapes that have not been so easy?
EW: Um, a couple of them. One I think, the most interesting was when I was in the antelope department, I don’t remember, bird department, it’s been a long time ago, but we had these little hoof stock called Indian Muntjac, that the storm sewer that was in their exhibit, the cover came off and these things walked down the storm sewer, and they are only like 18 inches high at the shoulders, probably weigh about 25 pounds, and we had like 6 or 7 of them get loose. This was prior to great escape and everything that is now in great escape was all wild, especially down by the lake, all the way to the golf course was just wild, you know, brush, trees, you know, kind of a swampy area. Anyway we had to form like a beating line at eh golf course and just walk up toward the zoo trying to find all of these muntjac that had gotten loose in there……..
AS: Wow.
EW: And you would hear on the radio that we have a sighting and everyone would go running to that area and it took days to find all those things, you know. Other things that were kind of exciting was, you know, one of the gorillas that I hand raised, Acasia, got out one day in great escape, and the only reason that we knew how she got out is that one of our keepers was actually close when she went back in, and learned, saw her climb into the moat, down a log and then throw the log down after she got back into the exhibit. So she knew, you know, what she was doing, but that’s why I go back to the saying that you have got to outsmart these things on what’s going on, especially the great apes. We had an orangutan that got loose not too long ago, within the last year, who got out of his exhibit and he ended up getting in the back of our plumber’s truck and we were able to drive him back to the great escape, opened the door and he crawled back into the exhibit. You know that was one of those, “well, that worked.”
AS: Thank goodness.
EW: Yeah, thank goodness.
AS: What are the precautions that you take to prepare for an escape?
EW: You know um, we have our ERT, Emergency Response Team, and I am a member of that, and we do our drills. Our first few drills when we started, we have kind of reformatted the ERT. At one time it was just curators and managers that were on that a long time ago, and whenever Burt Castro was here we expanded it out to keepers also, and that was a very smart thing to do, get more people involved and know what we are doing, and we never did routine drills, I mean never did routine drills, and the first few that we did were kind of ugly, you know, but after you have been doing them for a few years it pays off, and I think that is the most valuable thing that we have done out here, is that we actually do drills now and do different scenarios and we have to think, and we have to respond just like it’s a real code, and that’s what has made the difference.
AS: Do you have an opinion on our responsibility to inform the public? Do they need to know everything?
EW: No, you know that sometimes ignorance is bliss. Some things I don’t think that the public would understand, you know, do you think that the public would understand if we had to ship out Judy the elephant, do you know what I mean? If it’s a breeding recommendation for a SSP animal, you know, I say that but, you have to inform the public on a lot of things, but if something gets loose and it’s not a big deal there's no reason for the public to know that.
AS: Yeah I remember that, the kookaburra was it, that got loose and of course went to the tallest tree right in the middle of the exhibit, but I don’t know whether that was news worthy or not.
EW: Yeah I mean, so I’m kind of torn, some things you have to inform the public, because if you don’t inform them then they will understand. Some things, it’s probably better that they don’t know.
AS: So looking back, did your career turn out the way that you thought it would?
EW: You know, yes and no. When I first started here I didn’t think that I would be staying here, but I really like Oklahoma City and I developed a home here. So did I think that I would end up in the bird department when I started here 25 years ago or where I would be? I had no idea, so you know that’s a hard one to answer because I didn’t have any expectations coming into anything. I don’t really have any expectations coming into anything in life because life is just going to throw at you what life throws at you.
AS: This is probably going to be your retirement job though.
EW: Yeah.
AS: Because you have been here 25 years.
EW: Yeah 25, um, I’m not going to retire right now, sometimes I would like to because I have my own things I like to do and stuff like that, but then again logically I can’t retire at 47 you know. So another 10 years at least and it’s you know, the years go by so quickly out here. It doesn’t seem like it’s been 25 years, so 10 more years is going to be a blink of the eye.
AS: So what are your hobbies, things that you would do if you retired?
EW: Do you want a complete list?
AS: Sure.
EW: As a lot of people know I love to garden. I’m a big-time gardener. I have all my pets at home, dogs, cats, fish, koi, chickens, finches, the whole nine yards plus I don’t know how many plants. I’m a real avid embroiderer, so I do hand embroidered quilts that will take me years to do. I love working with wood, I like building furniture, I like building bird houses, chairs, wood carving. There’s a lot of things that I want to do that I won’t even let myself start right now just because I don’t have the time to increase what I’m doing right now. So I love to read, I’m a big Sci-fi/fantasy person, you know, I just have too many things that I would like to do.
AS: It’s interesting, be it some of those hobbies you have been able to do out here.
EW: Yeah.
AS: And did you just kind of create that for yourself?
EW: You know that almost everything that I learn how to do, I teach myself. Like whenever I first started embroidery, my dad just kind of, I learned a lot from my dad and didn’t even realize it until lately that my dad was the type that I can’t ever remember him hiring out anything. The house that I grew up in did not have a bathroom. Dad just built a bathroom. The roof would get hail damage, he would just replace the roof. The car broke down, he would, you know, fix it. Gardening, he would put in gardens and just do it. My mom was the same way and that’s why I have always, whatever I wanted to do I just picked it up and started playing with it and did it. On everything, gardening, wood working, embroidering, quilting, everything and that’s kind of how I will do everything.
AS: How would you like to be remembered by the zoo?
EW: You know, honestly it’s not something that I worry about. Like I said, I have a different philosophy on things and being remembered is not something that I really care, you know, I’m out here, I have a good life, you know, people remember me yeah, I hope that they remember me as a nice guy, and as a hard worker and stuff, but it’s not the top priority in my life. I guess not what I leave behind. I mean that I want to leave good things behind, but it’s just not something that I think about or worry about.
AS: What did you do really well out here?
EW: I think that the baby gorillas, I think that we did very well with those. We learned that we could ship some of them to different zoos and do like what we did with Zo out here, the baby chimpanzee, we shipped 2 or 3 baby gorillas to Columbus Zoo to be fostered and to older females to be raised like that. I think that when I was in the giraffe area I think that some of the best things that we did, we had like 3 Grants Gazelle babies, a zebra baby, okapi baby, that instead of sending them to the nursery we kept them over there, clicker trained them with bottles, got them back out to the herds, and in the case of the zebra we got her back out with mom, and mom actually raised her but we fed her, and by the time that we got through with those babies you could not tell them any differently from a mother raised animal, and that’s so much different than what we used to do where everything went to the nursery. Everything was bottle raised, which of course we bottle raised those too, but whenever they are raised with the herd they know what they are. And a lot of things that if we didn’t raise them with other of the same species, they had no idea what they were, and I think that was one of the best things that we did was being able to raise baby animals by hand, but yet having a great result where they knew what they were and did not want to be near people.
AS: So when the new Children’s Zoo opens is that going to change your job any?
EW: No not really. Other than make it a little bit easier because I can ship out the lorikeets that we have been holding on to. When they redid the Children’s Zoo we took a lot of their animals because we have a holding for the lorikeets, macaws, we had all the small primates, marmosets in our building and we were kind of maxed out there for a while until we were able to disperse animals into other parts of the zoo. And then like I said a lot of the small stuff like the lorikeets and the macaws will go back to the Children’s Zoo and that will help a lot.
AS: Do you like working with the lorikeets?
EW: Lorikeets are ok. I’m not a big parrot person. I can’t really understand why someone wants something that has, so noisy and so messy in their house. You know, lorikeets are fun. They have a personality, they like to play, it’s just having 80, or 68 of them in one building is just a little bit much, you know, you can only wear earplugs for so long without getting a headache and stuff like that, but they are fun, but they are not something that I would just be overjoyed with working with for the rest of my life.
AS: Well did you have any input on the flamingos, the lorikeets, the new bird exhibits?
EW: You know, whenever we were doing Oklahoma Trails we had, I had a lot of input into it, and that’s something that has changed out here before. When I first started it was the curators and the director was the one that designed the exhibits and that changed with Burt Castro. He actually got the keepers involved and we felt like we were involved, and I think that we came out with better exhibits. Of course I am always involved in making hand raising protocols and things like that, for the flamingos or lorikeets, when we are hand raising those or whatever we are doing, roadrunners, but I do feel like all of us are involved now. Not just a select few, but everyone has input in what we are doing, which I think is a good thing.
AS: Different from 25 years ago.
EW: A lot different than 25 years ago.
AS: So you have seen 5 managers, directors. Curtis…
EW: Lawrence Curtis, Wiley, Burt Castro…
AS: Oh 4.
EW: Four. And Dwight right now.
AS: So let’s see, I just want to make sure that I didn’t miss any of the important questions. What’s one of your earliest zoo memories as a child?
EW: Other than bugging my parents to take me to zoos? I think maybe what happened, I remember as a young child, going to Kansas City, my mom and dad took me, and I was less than five years old and they put me on an elephant for an elephant ride and I can still remember that. And they had some big blue whale that you walked through, and I remembered that and then they would always take us to the Tulsa Zoo, and I can remember all of the things about the Tulsa Zoo, even things that are not even there anymore, I still remember all of those. And then our big vacation once was coming to Oklahoma City and going to the Oklahoma City Zoo, and that was eye opening because they were just like oh, they have this and they have that, and my mom and dad tell me about how they had to keep hanging on to me because I kept going 4 or5 exhibits in front of them to see what else there was. They had a hard time, so I think those kinds of things are what, you know, set the tone for what I was going to do.
AS: What do you remember this place looking like when you were a kid?
EW: Dirt.
AS: Dirt yeah.
EW: You know.
AS: Red dirt.
EW: Red dirt, because like I said, the exhibits were not something that we were worried about even then. We had, the great apes were kept in concrete, you know, barred cages and the hoof stock, it was dirt, and the exhibits were small. Pachyderm Hallway at one time didn’t have the wire on the outside of the exhibits. It was actually like this, kind of like particle board or something with like three by three holes cut in them, a couple of perches and a bird and that was it. Now we have the open wire so, you know, from the bottom of the exhibit to the top and we put plants in and you know, we try to make them look as natural as something that’s in a building, that small exhibit look natural. It’s just night and day to what everything looked back then. The grounds, I have to say that the grounds when I first started here, the grounds were incredible and the grounds still are incredible but being a gardener I can tell that they are not what they used to be.
AS: Really?
EW: Yeah. I remember when I first started horticulture, every year we would do seedlings and they were planting plants all the time. I mean the greenhouse was always full of things that they were getting ready to plant. And it’s just because of staffing, it’s not anything that horticulture is not any more talented back then than what they are now. It’s just staffing. It’s hard to keep up. We’ve grown and grown and grown but our staffing has not grown to match that and there were things like columbine. They would plant flats and flats of columbine out here and you had dog row which was just one big garden. There used to be wisteria growing on all those dog pens over there and so in the springtime it would be nothing but a whole row of purple and they had iris that would come up and you know, it’s just changes.
AS: I never heard that. I’ve always heard just the opposite. I think that the gardens are great now, I don’t remember anything but red dirt and concrete earlier. So that surprises me.
EW: Yeah you know that a lot of those people that plant are plant people, and looking back knowing that, I mean, the gardens look nice now but, lots of weeds, lots of weed trees. It’s not horticultures fault, you know, they have got just as talented as a staff now as they had back then, just not as many people in the zoo as what we had back then, or about the same number just a lot more exhibits and a lot more responsibility than what we had back then.
AS: We have more wild places than what we used to, less formal gardens then?
EW: They were more wild gardens. Like I said, there were more plants that were flowering and more variety and stuff, and they actually had like a [unintelligible] collection, and they had a holly collection, and they would try to do these kind of different gardens, and I remember one of my favorite gardens when I first got here was the rock garden. It was right down by education toward what is now the canopy restaurant. That was the most beautiful alpine rock garden that Edith Simmons did. To this day I think that garden was just incredible, and now it’s kind of, unless you have the time to take care of it and keep it weeded and you know, gardening is an art where it’s like it takes a lot of work but you don’t want to make it look like it takes a lot of work, so they have gone, I just think the change in how they look and the number of how they are up kept.
AS: That’s an interesting perspective.
EW: Like I said, I’ll be different.
AS: Yeah. I have two questions left and we will probably wind down. Do you have one of those funny stories that when you are at a family gathering, that’s the story you tell?
EW: You know, the one that I tell out here a lot, and I have told my family, is that we used to have these monkeys called colobus monkeys. We had two groups of them and this was when the Children’s Zoo was like what it was a couple of renovations ago. We had a group of colobus there and where the front entrance is now used to be where the monkey pit was and we had a group of colobus there and we had a group in the Children’s Zoo. One day we had an escape. One of the monkeys was seen down in the Children’s Zoo and it was from the ones in the monkey pit and of course we all respond and caught up this animal and got it back in the exhibit and then we had a security officer walk up and go, “well I don’t know you all are so excited. It gets out every night and goes down there and visits them and goes back every morning.” So this guy had known this for I don’t know how long, and it was just normal for him. It’s just one of those things that you have to educate everybody on what is normal and what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, and I just think that is kind of one of those classic stories of you know, if you don’t educate anybody of everybody as to what’s going on, then those things are going to happen. But I always liked that one.
AS: That’s good. So you worked in the monkey ship, or monkey pit?
EW: I did not work there. It was here whenever I started.
AS: Ok.
EW: It was here for a number of years whenever I started. It wasn’t until we got our current front entrance that it disappeared.
AS: Ok. I get a lot of questions about that exhibit and I miss it. What did you think about it?
EW: It was horrible. I mean, they had made it better and I have to say that whenever it was a monkey ship, there was stories of when it got wet and cold you would have monkeys that were slipping off of the boat part of it because it would be metal of fiberglass, frost bite on animals because they didn’t have proper heating and stuff like that, and that happened a lot back then. That’s the reason that our harpy eagles don’t have toes and the king vultures, because they didn’t really, it was still a learning experience I think back then, but we had frost bite that would happen. You know, I heard stories of frost bite on monkeys’ hands and toes and stuff like that and then they went through, and they tore out the ship part and put dirt back in and some upright logs and better housing for cold climate and stuff like that. So they improved it a lot and it was still yet, one of those things where you are looking down on the animal and it was kind of a half way sterile exhibit, you know, they put grass in it and a few logs and stuff like that, but it’s probably better that it’s gone, you know, and that we are moving on, you know? It’s nice to remember those and have a history of them and have pictures and stuff like that, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be keeping them.
AS: Right. Interesting. So have you all changed the way that you over winter animals?
EW: Oh yeah, and I mean that I think that is zoo wide around the country. A lot of things you would get in and you would have no idea if it was winter hard here or not and so then I think that they were trying to push the envelope on some things. Some things worked and some things didn’t work. Now days yeah, we know that lorikeets have to be brought in at 50 degrees, you know, that West African crown cranes can out until 32. When I first started we pulled almost every duck that we had on zoo grounds and put it in for winter. Well most of those can stay outside, so I mean it goes both ways. They were bringing in things like rosy billed poachers, ringtail, and I can’t remember what all else but, now days we leave them outside, you know, and as long as they have the open water and the food, you know, some of the African hoof stock, we never brought anything in back when I was in the antelope area, everything had access to barns but they were all big tough animals, and now we have gerenuk that have temperature requirements, we have warthogs that have temperature requirements and, that’s kind of what we shifted to from these big hearty animals to these more delicate animals that need a little bit more care and a little more being aware of what’s going on with them.
AS: So is there anything that we didn’t get to talk about that you want to make sure that is on the record?
EW: Yeah, not really. I kind of looked at that question beforehand and thought about it but, you know, not anything that pops into my mind. It’s a fun place to work. It’s an interesting place to work. I think I wouldn’t change anything over the years. I’m happy where I am at now so I wouldn’t go back and change anything.
AS: Alright, I think that we are done then, right at an hour.