Friday, July 09, 1999
THE ZOO MOMS
Nursery keepers have mothered hundreds of animals
BY JIM KNIPPENBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Keeper Dawn Strasser feeds a crowned lemur.
(Gary Landers photo)
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They probably don't realize it, but these zoo babies are quite the comedians.
Anoa walks on spindly 3-month-old legs and wobbles but doesn't fall. She keeps bumping mom, who turns around and snorts, startling the calf.
Four oberhasli goats, their fur tufting up in unruly cowlicks, follow mom in parade formation, wobbling and crashing into each other, too.
Cecil, an 8-month-old western lowland gorilla, sits on Mama Muke's hip with a perpetually startled look on his face and his thumb in his mouth.
Only their mothers know these babies better than Dawn Strasser and Carol Schottelkotte.
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IF YOU GO
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• Who: More than 30 baby animals.
• What: Zoo Babies.
• When: July 10-Aug. 1
• Where: Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, 3400 Vine St., Avondale. You'll find zoo babies at all exhibits displaying a 7-foot stork with the baby's name and birth date.
• Tickets: $10, $7 seniors, $4.75 children.
• Information: 281-4700.
• Among the featured babies: Ganesh, the Asian elephant; two polar bears; three gorillas; two baby bongos; four black-footed penguins; one rock-hopper penguin; four Indochinese tigers; sand cat; crowned lemur; Japanese macaque.
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As head keepers of the nursery at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, they've mothered hundreds of animals. Ms. Schottelkotte was head keeper from 1976 to 1996. Now it's Ms. Strasser's turn, having apprenticed for 10 years with Ms. Schottelkotte, who left to teach at the Zoo Academy, an affiliate of Cincinnati Public Schools).
Many of the babies the two have mothered have become mothers themselves, “Which I guess makes me a grandmother,” Ms. Strasser says. “And Carol a great-grandmother.”
Many of those furry grandbabies will be on display starting Saturday during Zoo Babies, the 13th annual showcase of newborns.
Babies need lots of care
Sitting in her beige cinder block office in the rear of the zoo nursery, decked out for some serious cage cleaning in black rubber knee boots, green shorts and a faded red T-shirt, Ms. Strasser doesn't look like she has mothered hundreds of babies.
But she has, the same way all mothers mother. Up in the middle of the night to bottle-feed a 2-day-old gorilla? No problem. Ms. Strasser often sleeps in her office on an air mattress stashed in her beat-up gray locker, just as Ms. Schottelkotte did before her.
Sneak in a morning nap after sitting up all night making sure a baby bonobo doesn't yank its IV? Does it all the time.
Spend hours in a kitchen mixing up Milk Matrix, a fortified milk product the baby cats are especially fond of? Of course.
Spend still more hours chopping fruit and mixing it with yogurt before freezing it in ice cube trays? “All the time. They love their homemade popsicles, but they sometimes play with them instead of eating them. They like to watch them melt.”
File on every "kid'
The lemur is the nursery's only resident right now, so Ms. Strasser can take a break to catch up on filing.
Two file cabinets, four drawers each, are stuffed with baby records: medical charts; feeding schedules; notes on quirks — “don't touch this cat's head while it's nursing,” “this baby gorilla loves beach balls” or “watch the shrew, it's MEAN.”
“I started going through them last week and got to 216. That's maybe a fifth of the kids,” Ms. Strasser says.
“My kids,” she calls the babies who have graduated from the nursery. “I've sat up all night with many of them, like anybody does with an ailing child. If they need a shot, I give it. If they just need company, I do that, too.”
And cuddles. “You get in there with them, hug them, teach them to play with their toys, sometimes introduce them to other animals.”
In between, she works on the daily routine: Disinfect the nursery twice a day; clean cages, counters and floors; sterilize the isolation room, then sterilize baby bottles ranging from the size of a syringe to a full quart; order supplies; get meals; handle the crisis du jour.
Crises can come quickly
At the moment, there's no crisis and nothing brewing — most of the zoo's expectant mothers are proven breeders with good mothering skills, so the newborns will stay with them.
“But that can change in a minute,” she says. “I'll get a baby if a mother rejects it or can't nurse, or just doesn't know how to be a mother.”
Ms. Strasser does know how to be a mother, and her kids don't forget. Consider Uma the sand cat. Several years ago, Ms. Strasser cared for Uma through a rough infancy: She was underweight and ate only with coaxing. Uma survived, grew up and on March 18delivered her first baby, a female.
Like most first-time mothers (especially cats) she's being secretive, trying to keep her baby out of sight in a nesting box. Not when Ms. Strasser stopped by. “When I waved, she ran into the nesting box and dragged her baby out for me to see,” she says. “The cats always remember you, so do the primates.”
Such as Rowanda, the lowland gorilla. “It was almost 15 years ago, and she was my first. I fed her, diapered her, taught her to play ball. When she grew up, she went off on breeding loan.”
Years later, Rowanda was returned to the zoo. “I went to see her, and she came bounding up, doing that cooing sound gorillas do when they're happy.”
There are a lot of gorilla stories like that: 35 of the 46 born at the zoo were cared for in the nursery for the first six or so months of their lives.
All three of the babies in Gorilla World now are children of the Strasser/Schottelkotte team. “The gorillas have been my most intense experience here,” Ms. Schottelkotte says. “In '76 when they started breeding heavily, we knew nothing about raising them. We had to treat them like human babies.
“We didn't even have a zoo vet, so pediatricians from Children's Hospital would come over to examine them. But they didn't have a lot of time, so I had to quickly become a nurse and an expert on gorilla rearing.”
On-the-job training
It was learn as you go for both keepers. “When I was 10, I was in the zoo's Junior Zoologist Club, and I'd bring home baby skunks and racoons and care for them. You learn basics that way,” Ms. Strasser says.
“I read a lot of books, too, but mostly I learned by watching Carol for 10 years, and she learned by watching Nancy Maruska before her.”
There's no training program and no certification process for nursery keepers. The main requirement is that “someone would have already worked in other animal areas and showed great care and sensitivity” before going into the nursery, says general curator Mike Dulaney
It's apparently that care and sensitivity that have helped the two keepers raise happy animals. “It's mind boggling to me how many of my kids are now at other zoos leading healthy and reproductive lives.” says Ms. Schottelkotte. “I guess I am kind of a grandmother.”
Mothers aren't supposed to have favorites, but Ms. Strasser calls the white lions “my boys. I love them. Rowanda, too, and a few of the hooved animals.
“You love them all, really, but there's just something about certain ones.”
Mothers aren't supposed to have non-favorites either. But she does: “Sometimes I go by smell, and aardvarks are the worst. And the shrews, they're just plain mean to everybody. They come out mean.
“Aardvarks,” Ms. Schottelkotte sniffs. “They're just stinky. I remember once I told Dawn, "Let's get this thing out of here.' She said, "Why? I don't think it's so bad.' I told her to come in here early some morning and see. Eventually she did.”
One other thing Ms. Strasser isn't crazy about: “I don't do reptiles. The reptile keepers take care of their own babies. I do warm and fuzzy.”
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