Zoos for Morale

This summer more U.S. citizens than ever before will ponder the hippopotamus, resting on his belly in the mud, will regard the hooded cobra, the shuffling, suddenly acrobatic chimpanzee, the reflective giraffe, the plaintively greedy bears. U.S. zoos expect the largest crowds in history. Reason: all zoos can be reached by bus, streetcar or A-cards.

Zoos have been little affected by the war. Most of the food they need (hay, grain, green vegetables, horse meat) is unrationed. To replace scarce bananas they now serve a sweet potato; instead of Japanese ants, favorite food of many a zoo bird, they dish out a dried New Mexican water bug. Almost no animals have been imported in two years; zoos breed their own, and swap surplus stock. Lions are almost free for the asking.

Last week the biggest zoos prepared for their biggest year:

> Chicago's Brookfield Zoo counted on the birth of 90 mammals, the hatching of an equal number of rare birds. Its latest swap brought two Central American quetzals, green-crested, scarlet-breasted "world's most beautiful bird," from New York's Bronx Zoo. Brookfield's starring attractions: 300 monkeys which clamber about sandstone cliffs, four giant eland from the Sudan, which may soon be six.

> For 40 years keepers at the Bronx Zoo worried because tropical flamingos, an ace attraction, lost the bright red of their plumage after a winter in captivity. For 40 years they had been fed a diet which included Norwegian shrimp. The war forced substitution of New Orleans shrimp. This spring the long-stemmed birds emerged from winter quarters ruddier than ever. Their complete diet: a mixture of chopped green 'peppers, cod liver oil, fresh New Orleans shrimp, grated raw carrots, dried Mexican flies, dog biscuit, rice and brewer's yeast.

> In San Diego's Balboa Park Zoo, there was a quiet shift in emphasis: two horses marked for slaughter now pull a plow in the victory garden. Top billing at San Diego still goes to Ngagi, the slow, silent, 639-lb. gorilla. Ngagi's cage mate, Mbongo (645 lb.), died last year; he now has a lady friend, a mere shrimp named Kenya (165 lb.).

> In St. Louis, Zoo Director George P. Vierheller, who once took a chimpanzee to dinner in Manhattan's Hotel Pennsylvania, added more monkeys, trained dogs and another pony to his famed chimpanzee circus, featured for years in dull-week newsreels. (The chimps ride unicycles, dance the rumba, form a band which plays America, in a way.) He also expanded his performing elephant troupe to five, taught the pachyderms to play baseball (they already "shave" each other, "pass out" in a drinking scene). Vierheller's top act: the fortnightly feeding of two pythons, which have whole ground rabbits stuffed down their gullets. Says Vierheller of zoos in wartime: "People stop worrying when they come to the zoo."

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