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Best Place to Act Like An Animal
The Saint Louis Zoo
By Jeannette Batz Cooperman
Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

When you work at the Saint Louis Zoo, the residents set your clock. Today, associate veterinarian Martha Weber arrives at first light, determined to examine the eruptions on a female rhino’s hide before the morning mud-wallow. The splinter’s safely out of the goat’s nose; now Weber must anesthetize Tamari, a 10-year-old lion-tailed macaque (sliding back now-passive lips to reveal truly frightening yellow canines) and remove that pesky hernia dressing. Only then will Weber reach the day’s peak experience: prying open the wide, tightly compressed mouths of the tiny Puerto Rican crested toads to take mucus samples. She wants to confirm the necropsy lab’s latest CSI triumph: a technician detected a parasite burrowed into the nasal cavity of a toad cadaver and realized that the parasite could be what’s making them sick.

Weber did her residency at the zoo, then went off to work for Disney. She returned because she missed the camaraderie (where else do people put hissing cockroaches in their mouths for effect?) and dedication. “We have never been told, ‘No, you can’t do that CAT scan—it’s too expensive,’” she says. “Besides, I’m not a very good corporate employee. Here, if I didn’t like something [zoo director Jeffrey] Bonner did, I could go tell him.”

Anne Bartin, zoological manager of the Children’s Zoo, arrives at 7 a.m. to check the weather, decide whether the pygmy goats should play outside, make sure there are enough frozen rats in the freezer to satiate the birds of prey and set schedules. Who will take Schneider the squirrel through his paces on the jungle gym in the employee restroom? And who will lure—she might save this plum job for herself—the female Matschie’s tree kangaroo close enough for the excited crowds to get a peek at Little LaRoo, still ensconced in her mother’s pouch but with front paws and face now showing?

Penguin keeper Frank Fischer gets off to a late start this week, an indolent 8 a.m., just in time to grin at the other keeper, who’s been submerged in the frigid exhibit pool for an hour already, his wetsuit scant protection against the chill as he scrubs rock and vacuums up penguin droppings. Fischer is on kitchen detail this week, and he looks like a hybrid galley cook–mad scientist as he rinses thawed herring (hand-fed to the kings), capelin (a favorite of the Gentoo, which shoot straight out of the water and land on their feet), trout (preferred by the Humboldts) and lake smelt (for the tiny rockhoppers, crowned with yellow tufts of feathers). The sink shines with iridescent capelin—lavender, burnt orange, taupe and silver—as Fischer rinses off the fishes’ protective coating so that it won’t crust at the corners of the birds’ beaks. As he works, he tosses aside body parts: “Penguins like their fish whole. They wouldn’t come across a headless fish in the ocean.” He slides vitamins behind the gill of each fish, checking a whiteboard to see who gets what. Then he turns to the puffins’ chop, reaching for pink squid tentacles and a thawed block of krill and adding a squirt of thiamine paste, and dipping into a dog food–cricket mix for the Eider ducks.

Fischer has worked at the zoo for 20 years (a record not unusual among the zoo’s 300-or-so full-timers), so his entry-level penury has grown respectable. “Working with the animals, I don’t worry about being laid off,” he says. (How many other scientists would scrub fish before beginning the day’s complex data documentation?) He gets five weeks of vacation and great benefits—including the fierce affection of Double, a Gentoo penguin who sidles along behind him as he scrubs the highest boulders, snapping at any other penguin who approaches. Double and her sister, Trouble, hop out of the exhibit so frequently, the keepers have placed a ramp out front so the birds can waddle up and dive back home again.

If possible, Fischer will meet his wife for lunch. (They’re one of many zoo couples; she’s a keeper at the Antelope House, and she adores the smell of antelope manure but is less fond of her spouse’s pungent, nose-tingling, densely fishy aroma. Parent-teacher conferences right after work are amusing.) The khaki-clad keepers live by their animals’ schedules, though, so they don’t form the cheerful lunch cliques one sees in the Living World cafeteria, where today’s staff gossip is the baby tree kangaroo. A woman from administration sneaks over to the Children’s Zoo after lunch to catch a glimpse. Soft-voiced, patient as a safecracker, Bartin ignores the gathering crowd and uses sweet potatoes to coax the mother down, inch by inch, from the highest branches. But only if she wants to come.