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The San Diego Zoo’s hidden world

A look behind the scenes at a 100-year-old institution

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With about 3.5 million visitors every year, the zoo is one of San Diego’s best-known attractions — and one of its oldest. This year marks the 100th anniversary of its founding.

For all its fame and longevity, though, the zoo remains in many ways a mystery, at least to its guests. What goes into feeding the animals? Training them? Who is that person talking over a microphone about the pandas or operating a giraffe puppet for the nighttime parade? Why do the tarantula terrariums have yellow stickers?

With the cooperation of zoo officials, the Union-Tribune gained access to a variety of behind-the-scenes moments for a “Day in the Life” look at this institution that helps shape how San Diego is viewed by the world.

The zoo has become a nonprofit juggernaut that has its mix of conservation, entertainment and education down to a science — a far cry from its seat-of-the-pants origins, when founder Harry Wegeforth built the collection any way he could, flying to the Salton Sea to trap pelicans, stealing a backyard-pet alligator, paying local residents to bring in snakes.

But there is still room for the unexpected, for a baby Sichuan takin that has to be bottle-fed, for a tamandua that might be pregnant, for a mousetrap tree from Madagascar that arrives in California via a German botanist.

Wegeforth never wanted an “ordinary” zoo, but it’s unlikely even he imagined just how broad the collection would become, some 3,700 specimens that range from three-quarter-inch Sunburst diving beetles to 10-foot-tall elephants.

Nor could he have imagined all that goes on backstage to keep his century-old dream alive, year after year, month after month, day after unpredictable day.

View the photo gallery: The zoo's hidden world

5:30 a.m. Forage Warehouse

At an hour when most humans have not contemplated their first cup of coffee, Allison Kaastra is loading up the back of a pickup truck with vacuum-packed bags of frozen mice. Also bins filled with meat, produce, insects, refrigerated eucalyptus branches and a femur bone or two. Or as the animal residents of the San Diego Zoo like to call it, breakfast, lunch, dinner and incentive.

“Today I’m delivering 40 pounds of raisins to the elephants,” says Kaastra, a nutritional assistant whose day starts at 4:30 a.m. “Elephants will do anything for a handful of raisins. You’d think it would be something bigger, like prunes or something. But it’s raisins.”

Welcome to the Forage Warehouse, where pretty much everything consumed by the zoo’s 3,700 or so animals is received, logged and packed before being trucked to animal holding areas. The Circle of Life starts here.

“We’re like the Costco of the zoo,” says senior nutritional services assistant Jimmie Cunningham, as he packs up apples, bok choy, carrots and collard greens bound for the Reptile House. “Everything from bugs to femur bones comes through here.”

The cost of feeding the zoo’s massive menagerie is $125,000 a month. Restaurant-quality produce is delivered to the warehouse four times a week, with carrots and yams being most in demand. There are two bone deliveries per week for the carnivores and big cats, weekly deliveries of ants and the California condors’ beloved cow spleens, and weekly shipments of live termites and live fruit flies.

And in the Bug Room, nutritional services assistant Taylor Runge spends her early mornings parceling out some of the 230,000 crickets the zoo goes through every week. The birds like their crickets alive and lively; Runge likes them unaccompanied by surprise guests.

“I’m not bug-phobic, except maybe for spiders,” says Runge, who wears two pairs of disposable gloves to protect herself from the crickets’ scratchy legs. “Sometimes the crickets come in with spiders in their package, and I have to fish them out. That catches me off guard.”

6:30 a.m. Koalas

There are 22 Queensland koalas on display at the zoo, and when senior mammal keeper Jennifer Roesler arrives, they’re all sleeping — not just because it’s barely past daybreak, but because that’s what koalas do more than anything else. They snooze about 18 to 20 hours a day.

“We all want to come back in our next lives as koalas,” one of the other keepers said.

“Koalas in captivity,” Roesler replied. “I don’t want to have to struggle with my daily existence.”

These koalas get breakfast in bed. The food is eucalyptus, harvested from a 13-acre farm the zoo has in the Miramar area. Roesler pulls branches from a walk-in cooler, arranges them in bundles and takes them outside to the pen housing a koala named Mundoe.

A canister holding yesterday’s eucalyptus is lowered on pulleys, the old branches are replaced with new ones, and the canister is raised again. Mundoe barely stirs while this is happening, but he’ll start munching before too long. Koalas eat about 2 pounds of eucalyptus daily.

View the Video New Koala Joey Emerges from Mother’s Pouch

When the exhibit was built, the idea was to use food as an incentive and make the koalas follow the canisters down to the ground, where they could be weighed and examined. “But they figured out if they just waited, we’d raise the canisters again,” Roesler said. “We thought we were training them. They were training us.”

The keepers vary the diet, using almost two dozen types of eucalyptus. Toxin levels in the trees change over the course of the year, Roesler said, and so do the animals’ appetites. Keepers know it’s time to switch when the koalas stop eating.

San Diego’s collection of koalas — 22 on display, another 28 on loan to other zoos — is the largest outside Australia. When one of them needs to be moved, often for breeding purposes, it flies not in cargo, but in a carrier in first class. A keeper goes with it.

Nobody will have to twist Roesler’s arm to make her accompany Mundoe on his upcoming loan. The koala is headed to Europe, maybe France.

7:45 a.m. Opening prep

The zoo opens in an hour. At Elephant Odyssey, keepers are raking the ground, filling “puzzle feeders” with hay to challenge the behemoths to use their brains and not just their trunks if they’re hungry. A maintenance staffer runs a squeegee over a window to give visitors a cleaner look at the big cats. A retail clerk makes sure stuffed pandas are on the shelves.

There are thousands of details to fret about, and today Victor Stewart is in charge of the fretting.

He’s the duty manager. He walks around with his head on a swivel, up and down, left and right. He inspects the restrooms, asks a food server when the coffee will be ready, checks if the Skyfari operators are at their stations.

He’s looking for trouble, and then he finds it: A sprinkler is getting the pavement all wet near the flamingo exhibit. The leaves of a plant are hanging low, blocking the sprinkler’s spray, and they should be trimmed, Stewart says. He makes a note on a pad he carries in his pocket.

Stewart likens the zoo to “a mini city.” It has houses, streets, water pipes, restaurants, lights, offices, roads, a security force, even a hospital. Most of the people who visit the zoo don’t notice all of the things that have to happen before the gates ever open.

“There’s a lot of rush, rush, rush to get ready,” he said.

As he checks the preparations, it helps that the zoo workers wear color-coordinated shirts: blue (retail), green (grounds and maintenance), white (guest services), tan (keepers), red (volunteers). Even if Stewart doesn’t know who the workers are, he knows what they do. Or should be doing.

Walking toward Gorilla Tropics, Stewart sees a sticker on the ground and peels it from the pavement. He finds a child’s drinking cup under a bush, a custodian’s rag outside a gift shop, a chain with a “Do Not Enter” sign on it that’s been dislodged from its pole.

All pretty minor stuff, which is fine with Stewart. He remembers what it was like on May 25, when the giraffe Harriet gave birth in the middle of the day, in the middle of the exhibit. Keepers put “maternity fences” around Harriet to shield her from other wandering giraffes, as surprised and delighted visitors swarmed the railing.

People taking pictures and videos filled the sidewalk and spilled into the street. Tour buses slowed and stopped. Stewart became part of an impromptu squad of traffic cops while Harriet delivered a male baby, 6 feet tall and weighing 146 pounds.

8:30 a.m. The Horticulture Nursery

When Conrad Prebys Africa Rocks opens next year, the eight-acre exhibit will be populated with baboons, leopards, lemurs and African penguins. It will also be home to the stunning specimen basking in the glow of the morning sun: the mousetrap tree of Madagascar.

Officially known as Uncarina grandidieri, the zoo’s mousetrap tree came to California in the early 1960s via a cutting obtained in Madagascar by a visiting German botanist. He gave the cutting to the Grigsby Cactus Gardens in Vista, where it grew into the massive, impressively gnarled thing that became a bit of an obsession for Mike Letzring, the senior plant propagator who has been gathering greenery for the new Africa Rocks exhibition for nearly five years.

“I have a real passion for these plants,” Letzring says of the mousetrap tree and a large aloe suzannae that was also part of the German botanist’s booty. “I’ve looked at them for years, and when I started Africa Rocks, I asked (owner) Madeline Grigsby if she’d donate or sell them. She took the selling route.”

There are more than 700,000 exotic plants growing on the zoo’s 100-acre grounds, each with a job to do. There is bamboo for feeding the pandas and eucalyptus for the koalas. Pygmy chimps chew on willow branches, which contain an aspirin-like chemical known as salicin. Primates chow down on hibiscus foliage, while Galapagos turtles get the hibiscus flowers.

As for Letzring’s Africa Rocks plants — the mousetrap tree, the spiny Didierea trollii, the otherworldly baobab trees — those are at least partially for the people.

“The plants give you that immersion experience in the habitat where the animals come from,” says Letzring, who waters many of these treasures by hand. “To see people’s amazed reaction to the uniqueness of the plant material that is out there, that is so satisfying, because that’s what I feel inside.”

9 a.m. Taking flight

Zoo visitors are eager to begin exploring. They’ve bought their tickets, gone through the turnstiles,and now they’re standing behind temporary ropes just beyond the zoo entrance when Katie Cheng, an animal trainer, maneuvers the bird cart into position.

It’s time for a winged welcome.

The bird cart is a small truck with a large cage on the back. Cheng flips a switch that raises the cage 14 feet into the air, then flips another switch to open the door. Seven colorful macaws fly past the roped-in visitors, who applaud and take pictures. The birds disappear behind the Wegeforth Bowl, back to their enclosures.

“Have fun,” Cheng tells the crowd and as the ropes are lowered, people surge in different directions. Many of them head first to the double-decker tour buses, which offer a 40-minute overview of the zoo’s history, grounds and exhibits. The zoo has had tours since 1927, interrupted during World War II because of gasoline rationing, and they have long been one of the most popular attractions.

A fleet of 12 double-decker and four single-deck buses requires a garage and mechanics to keep them running. People to wipe them down between tours. And people to drive them.

Steering and braking are only part of the job description. They also have to memorize “tour content” and be ready for questions. Lots of questions.

The most popular one? According to Chris Clobber, one of the tour guides, it’s “Should I sit upstairs or down?” He said people want to know where they can get the best view, and for that they should instead ask, “Left or right?” Which side of the bus, he tells them, depends on which animals they most want to see.

All zoo employees wear name tags, and on Clobber’s it says “Zooman.” That’s his nickname. When he’s not working at the zoo he does stand-up comedy, and sometimes the two mix. He cracks jokes as people move through the line. Later, there will be Tarzan yells.

Sometimes the passengers he entertains are imposters. They aren’t there to enjoy the tour but to grade it. Hired by zoo administrators, they pose as visitors and then file reports about their experiences. What worked well, what didn’t. Changes are made accordingly.

9:15 a.m. Photo fandom

The zoo has been open for just 15 minutes, and Peter Csanadi is already in his favorite spot. Not the Reptile House, which he loves. Or the Urban Jungle, where he has spent many rapt hours watching the giraffes, rhinos, cheetahs and flamingos. Not even the orangutan exhibit, which is his first stop of the morning.

For Peter Csanadi — San Diego Zoological Society member, frequent zoo visitor and zoo photo enthusiast — the best destination is the state of bliss he enters the moment he steps foot on the zoo grounds.

“There is such a pureness to these animals. There are no politics, there are no ulterior motives,” says the 57-year-old graphic artist. “It’s almost a Zen-like, refreshing experience to just stand and watch them.”

The San Diego Zoological Society has more than a half-million members, some of whom visit the zoo and the Safari Park a time or two a year, and others who come often enough to know their favorite animals and keepers by name. In 2009, a red panda named Fuji turned Csanadi into one of those people.

“The turning point was when I learned Fuji’s name,” Csanadi says of the panda, who died in 2010. “Then it became something very personal. It made me want to learn other animals’ names and it made me start talking with the keepers and paying more attention to the animals’ behaviors.”

So as tourists snap photos of the orangutans happily licking banana-flavored baby food off the inside of the enclosure windows (a treat provided by the keepers to give the kids from zoo art camp something to draw), Csanadi is not taking photos. Instead, he is asking senior keeper Tanya Howard how the other orangutans are faring after the death of Janey, the 55-year-old matriarch who had to be euthanized in June.

Before becoming his mother’s full-time caregiver, Csanadi was visiting the zoo three times a week, usually accompanied by his trusty Nikon D7100 camera. Now he visits every other week or so, and while the North Clairemont resident frequently shares his work on social media (a recent photo of two grizzly bear brothers wrestling got more than 10,400 views on the zoo’s Instagram feed), the fan who loves taking photos might be happiest when he is just taking it all in.

“My main reason for coming here is that it really gets me away from the news and from everything that happens outside of the zoo,” Csanadi says. “It’s hard to focus on the presidential election when an orangutan is licking baby food off the glass.”

9:45 a.m. Meerkat enrichment

What with the eating (cat chow, fruit and meal worms, yum), digging (260 holes, give or take), and sunbathing (so much sunbathing), life in the meerkat exhibit is a furry whirlwind of morning activity. And now some of the zoo’s busiest non-bees are about to get busier.

It’s enrichment time. First, senior keeper Victoria Girdler and enrichment supervisor Jessica Sheftel bring the toys. Bamboo tubes stuffed with hay and meal worms. Wooden pet puzzles and hollowed-out gourds primed with crickets and more meal worms. Then members of the 20-count meerkat “mob” descend, all bright, beady little eyes and cartoon-character energy. It looks a lot like the cutest riot ever, but it is really one of the many teaching moments that happen throughout the zoo every day.

“This all helps with their natural instincts,” Girdler says, as tiny competitive growls emerge from one of the hay- and worm-filled boxes. “Hunting is important. Foraging is important. And with the communal digging, they’re eating a family meal together, so to speak. It’s important for the family bonds.”

In the meerkats’ native southern Africa, pretty much everything is done by committee. One mob member is always on top of a rock or termite mound, the better to spot marauding jackals and falcons and alert the others to head for the burrows. Meerkats will also work together to capture lizards, fight off snakes and raise meerkat babies.

View the Video Meerkat pups at the San Diego Zoo

Growling aside, enrichment activities keep the meerkats busy and stimulated, which keeps the mob healthy and functioning at peak eating, sunbathing and lizard-dismembering efficiency. (It also gives the meerkats the energy to follow Girdler around the exhibit and re-dig their holes the minute she fills them in. She’s fast, but they are faster.)

The zoo’s animal enrichment efforts have their human benefits, too. From gorilla toys made out of recycled firehoses to treat balls carved from palm-tree trunks, many enrichment items are made-to-order by zoo volunteers. The keepers send over their wish lists, and the volunteers pull out their power tools and ingenuity and get to work. The rewards go both ways.

“The keepers come up with ideas, and we’ll say, ‘Yes, we can make a Lucite puzzle for the orangutans to play with at night,’” says Lori Vallier, as she and her fellow enrichment volunteers paint gourds and sand bamboo tubes on the patio of the volunteer office. “We feel passionate about the animals and the people who work with them. We love everything they do here, and we support them with money and time and whatever else a volunteer can give.”

10:15 a.m. Dental care

Zari the zebra is smiling.

It’s a cute behavior, all teeth, but appearances have nothing to do with it. Zari has been trained to open her mouth so her teeth can be cleaned.

A few moments earlier, Char Davis, the trainer, had opened a door at the back of the zebra exhibit and given Zari the command to smile. Now Davis reaches in with a file and works on the back molars. When she’s done, Zari gets a treat: alfalfa pellets.

The zebra also has been trained to let Davis clean her ears and lift her feet to trim and brush her hooves. Davis works on the right front hoof and says to a visitor, “Don’t try this at home.”

That’s because getting an animal to go along with all this is a slow, painstaking process. When she was training Zari for dental care, Davis said, she made the mistake of moving too quickly with the file. The zebra recoiled when Davis used it the first time.

“All the trust I’d built up with her went to zero that day,” she said. “I emptied the account, and it took a while to get it back.”

It would have been better, Davis said, to introduce the file slowly. Show it to Zari and reward her with a pellet when she doesn’t flinch. Put it into her mouth without touching anything, then another pellet. Touch the teeth, pellet. File lightly, pellet. And so on. It can take weeks.

In the same way, trainers are working with a cheetah so they can draw blood from the tip of its tail. First they touch the tail, then they jab it lightly, then the needle.

Doing these kinds of procedures in the past involved sedating or restraining the animals, Davis said. Training them to participate in their own care is less hazardous. Davis, who has been training animals for more than 20 years, said one of the keys with Zari is that the zebra is not on a leash and can back away whenever she wants.

“The door is open,” she said. “It’s up to her.”

10:30 a.m. Nest building

In a makeshift workshop furnished with recycled shelving and a table she found in a Normal Heights alley, senior bird keeper Laurie Brogan is helping the superb bird-of-paradise, the blue-crowned pigeon and her Australasia Exhibit birds feather their nests. Some need more assistance than others.

For the more accomplished avian architects, Brogan puts nest-making materials in their cages — excelsior from the craft store, silk from the zoo’s silk trees, hair from the zoo’s wolves and camels — and lets them do their thing. The slightly less accomplished get wire or pipe-cleaner bases for a sound foundation they can build around. That group includes the temperamental red-billed leiothrix, which can’t build their nests if anyone is watching.

“All of them are a little challenging in their own way,” Brogan says from the supply-stuffed nook she carved out of a vacant space tucked in the shadow of a Skyfari pole. “Sometimes this is what it takes to encourage breeding. It’s awesome to know that you’ve helped in any way, shape or form. I feel like they’re my kids.”

Then there are the birds that need the complete Brogan package — hand-made nests that are fully formed and move-in ready.

“Some of them truly are bird brains,” Brogan says fondly. “Some of them just don’t build a very sound nest, or they’ll lay an egg smack on the nest-box wire. And some of the doves will just put two sticks down and call it a nest. Sometimes you wonder how they got so far.”

11 a.m. Clean water

Hippos have been popular at the zoo since 1936, when Puddles arrived. Born a year earlier at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, he was the first of his kind displayed at a zoo on the Pacific Coast. He made crowds laugh by rolling on his back and waving his legs in the air.

In the 1940s, Rube and Ruby, imports from Calcutta, became stars — star attractions, and star breeders. They had 11 offspring together and lived at the zoo for more than four decades. One of their favorite tricks was crunching down on whole watermelons.

People who admire the hippos don’t often think about the water in the exhibit, but Kevin Dempsey does. He’s the lead water quality operator and a 21-year veteran of the zoo.

In the old days, before pumps and filtration, the hippo pool was filled with water, emptied after several days, then filled again. The practice was wasteful and time-consuming.

The current hippo exhibit opened in 1995 and the 185,000-gallon pool, the largest of 147 at the zoo, has only had to be drained twice in 21 years. Behind the exhibit, a treatment plant keeps the water clean, pumping 1,200 gallons a minute through filters and digesters to remove the hay that makes up a large part of a hippo’s diet.

“Not to get too graphic about it, but what goes into the hippo is pretty much what comes out,” Dempsey said.

Taking care of the pool is still time-consuming, about 35 hours of labor every week. It takes three hours just to vacuum. But the results are worth it, Dempsey said. Visitors like to hang out at the exhibit, which enables an underwater view of the hippos and the fish swirling around them. Engineers planning exhibits at other zoos and aquariums often come to San Diego for tours of the filtration system.

When the hippos make news — after a baby is born, for example — TV stations across the country often show footage from the zoo. Dempsey’s mother, who lives in Boston, beams when she’s watching one of the segments with friends.

“My son filters that water,” she tells them.

11:30 a.m. Distractions

The zoo’s animal ambassadors — taken to schools, TV stations and other places for up-close encounters with people — require regular training to keep them focused.

Right now. it’s Cheka’s turn.

He’s a 1-year-old serval, a small cat with a long neck, long legs and big ears. All those characteristics come in handy in his native habitat, the savannahs of Africa, where servals hide in the grass, listen for prey — birds, reptiles, frogs, large insects — and then pounce.

Cheka (Swahili for “to laugh”) was born at the zoo, but his hunting instincts remain, and it’s his ears that get him in trouble during today’s training. He hears birds in the trees and gets easily distracted.

“You can’t have them,” trainer Katie Miller tells the cat. “Sorry.”

To work on Cheka’s attention-span, Miller and trainer Zabrina Boman bring him in a carrier to a small patio that’s fenced off from the public near the Children’s Zoo. The trainers set out a carpet and a wooden stand. Using hand and voice commands, Miller calls Cheka out of the carrier and onto the carpet, and then from the carpet onto the stand.

When Cheka responds correctly, Miller gives him a piece of meat and clicks a clicker. When Cheka would rather watch the birds, Miller repeats the command.

In the wild, servals can leap up to 9 feet into the air to grab a bird. Cheka looks into the branches often, seemingly calculating his chances. But Miller has him on a leash, and keeping it taut reminds the cat why he’s here. Miller gets him to go back into the carrier, then onto the carpet, then into the carrier.

After several minutes, the training session ends. Cheka is young, and Miller said she’s pleased with his progress.

The birds, no doubt, would be happy to hear it.

Noon Takin feeding

View the Video Baby takin nursing again

If zoo guests are not sure what a Sichuan takin is, it is not from lack of exposure. The takin enclosure is located inside Panda Trek, one of the zoo’s most perpetually mobbed exhibits. But in their eagerness to get to the roly-poly stars of the show, visitors tend to hustle past the dusty enclosure that is home to the small herd of shaggy antelope-goats with the curved horns and the split hooves. It’s their loss.

If they would just hang back for a moment, they could feast their eyes on Hsi Hsi (pronounced “Cee-Cee”), the adorable, not-yet-shaggy baby takin toddling toward the sound of senior keeper Becky Kier’s clicker and the promise of her second bottle-feeding of the day.

Hsi Hsi was born on May 22 to first-time mother Duli, who was sick while she was pregnant and still under the weather when Hsi Hsi was born. (She has since recovered.) When zoo staffers saw that the baby wasn’t nursing, the Neonatal Assisted Care Unit took over feeding duties. Hsi Hsi has taken to her goat-milk based formula like a champ, and she is currently guzzling three quarts a day and gaining almost seven pounds a week.

And with the help of her aunts, Mei and Eve, she is busy learning to be a takin. Hsi Hsi is already an agile climber and enthusiastic head-butter. She is not at all interested in the humans who show up three times a day with her quart of formula and an animal biscuit for a treat. For the keepers on the other side of the bottle, that is the best news of all.

“So far, she is acclimated completely,” Kier says after wiping Hsi Hsi’s formula-covered face and sending her on her way. “She would definitely rather hang out with her kind than with me.”

12:30 p.m. Arachnid Rescue Center

They called it Operation Spiderman.

In December 2010, federal agents arrested Sven Koppler, 37, of Germany, on suspicion of illegally importing wildlife into the United States — specifically, tarantulas.

They’d been investigating him for about nine months, after discovering during a routine inspection 300 live tarantulas in a package shipped to Los Angeles. Agents intercepted a second L.A.-bound package with 250 spiders, including 22 Mexican red-kneed tarantulas, a species protected under an international treaty.

Undercover agents contacted Koppler and ordered 70 tarantulas. When he came to Los Angeles to meet an associate, he was arrested, according to court records. By then, agents said, he had made about $300,000 selling tarantulas around the world, including to nine people in the United States.

Koppler pleaded guilty to one count of smuggling in early 2011 and was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $4,000. Case closed. But what to do with the spiders?

Dozens were sent to the zoo, where they are kept in the Arachnid Rescue Center, a small, locked room near the Children’s Zoo. To approximate the spiders’ native environment, the room is kept warm (83 degrees) and humid (65 percent).

Chris Mooney, senior keeper, doesn’t seem to mind. He moves easily among the glass terrariums, lifting the top on one to clean it. Almost all of the enclosures have a yellow tag on them, indicating that the insect inside is venomous. Each tag lists what kind of spider it is, and if a keeper is bit, the tag goes along with the victim to the hospital so doctors will know what they’re dealing with.

Hasn’t happened yet, Mooney said.

Because illegal smuggling is an ongoing threat to wildlife, zoo officials believe the rescue center fits into their conservation mission, although they acknowledge many visitors are squeamish around spiders, especially large ones. One species, the Brazilian white-knee birdeater, conjures images of dinner plate-sized spiders knocking down prey in mid-flight, but Mooney said the name comes from rare attacks on nesting birds.

The rescue center isn’t open to the public, but visitors can look at the occupants through a window on one side. Close, but not that close, which is probably how many prefer it.

1:15 p.m. Speaking panda

The sign at the beginning of Panda Trek says the wait is 35 to 40 minutes. Might be nice to have something that will help pass the time.

That’s where Kay Ferguson comes in.

She’s a panda interpreter, and from her chair in one corner of the exhibit, she speaks through a microphone to give visitors information about the popular black and white bears: what they eat, what they weigh, how old they are when they first start climbing. Even how often they poop.

View the Video Kay Ferguson is the Panda Interpreter

Ferguson has been doing this for about 20 years, in shifts that last four to six hours, and she knows the pandas so well that when Xiao Liwu begins to settle in for a nap in a tree, she calls out his moves before he does them.

“Put the paws up,” she says, and Xiao Liwu does, onto a branch.

“Get one more picture before he turns around,” she tells the visitors, just as Xiao Liwu rises up and shifts position.

If Ferguson’s wardrobe is any indication, she loves her work. She’s wearing panda earrings, panda socks, a panda pendant. Her purse and cellphone case have pandas on them.

The Lemon Grove resident is 76 and has no plans to retire. “I’ll probably die in this chair,” she said.

Her running commentary includes facts she’s learned from the keepers, through reading, or from her own observations. She said she tries to answer the questions people have in their heads before they ask them.

Ferguson used to be in the Lamb’s Players theater group, so performing comes easily to her, but she still needs tricks to avoid repeating herself too often. She can see down the line of visitors and she’ll pick out a person near the back — a man wearing a brown hat, for example. When he gets to the front of the line, she knows it’s OK to cycle back through some of her factoids.

Her command of the material is such that it’s not surprising when one of the visitors stops by her chair and grumbles about how Xiao Liwu is sleeping with his back turned, not the best angle for photos.

The man asks Ferguson, “Can’t you get him to turn around again?”

2 p.m. Pregnancy check

Tamanduas, also known as lesser anteaters, have been a part of the zoo off and on for more than 80 years. Four are there now, and one of them might be pregnant.

Time for an ultrasound.

Any birth at the zoo is celebrated, but tamandua offspring are rare. There’s only been one in the zoo’s history.

Blanca, a female about 8 years old, has been seen recently getting close to Otis, the zoo’s lone male, in their shared quarters behind Wegeforth Bowl. They haven’t been observed mating, but trainers Julia Hursh and Katie Cheng have found them asleep side by side and they’re wondering just how far the relationship has gone.

“It would be exciting to have a baby here,” Hursh said.

Veterinarian Ryan Sadler arrives with a portable ultrasound machine — more commonly used on cows and ducks — into the tamandua cage behind Wegeforth Bowl. (Blanca and Otis are both ambassador animals, taken to schools and other places, and not on public display.)

Blanca has been trained to accept not just someone touching her belly, but putting gel on it. She’s learned that she gets a treat if she cooperates, and today the treat is a bowl full of smashed-up avocado, her own guacamole.

“She a California anteater,” Hursh jokes. (They’re actually from Mexico and Central and South America.)

Cheng holds the food bowl a couple of feet off the ground so that Blanca has to get up on her hind legs to reach it. That leaves her belly exposed. On goes the gel, and Sadler begins moving the probe around and watching the screen.

His verdict on the pregnancy? Maybe.

“The uterus looks a little different,” he said. “There’s nothing definitive yet, but I think there have been some encouraging signs.” He said if Blanca continues to spend time with Otis, she probably isn’t pregnant. If she starts rejecting him, she probably is.

If the trainers are disappointed by his findings, they don’t show it. “Maybe is better than no,” Hursh says.

Sadler packs up the ultrasound. Blanca finishes the avocado, sniffs around the cage a bit, and then settles down for a nap.

“Keep her with the male,” Sadler tells the trainers. “Let’s see what happens.”

2:45 p.m. Under construction

A century ago, zoo founder Harry Wegeforth figured out where the various exhibits would go by riding around the undeveloped grounds in Balboa Park on horseback. He envisioned birds, monkeys and hoofed mammals on the mesas, and bears and cats in the canyons.

Exhibits were funded on a hand-to-mouth basis. The zoo would borrow money from a bank, build the display, and then show it to donors and, in essence, beg them to pay off the loan.

Construction planning is different now, architect Steven Fobes says as he leads a tour of the zoo’s current project, Conrad Prebys Africa Rocks, now under construction.

Africa Rocks will replace one of those areas Wegeforth eyed from horseback, the old Dog and Cat Canyon, which dates to the 1930s. At eight acres and $68 million, Africa Rocks is the largest project in the zoo’s history. Fobes said it was first presented to the zoo’s board in about 2007, and when ground was broken last summer, most of the money needed had already been raised.

The old canyon exhibits were grottoes built along one side of a steep road, with not much attention paid to mimicking the native environments of their inhabitants. In the new exhibit, there will still be a road for the tour buses, but it will be along the southern edge. Pedestrians will walk on a gently sloping, meandering path past various ecosystems housing baboons, leopards, monkeys and crocodiles, among other animals. There will be a 65-foot waterfall and a large pool for penguins.

Building something new in the middle of a working zoo has its challenges. Fobes points to the sound walls constructed to buffer nearby animals from the noise. Crews start work at daybreak and are usually done by 2:30 p.m.

And Africa Rocks, scheduled to open next summer, has specific complications, too. The elevation change from the top to the bottom is 90 feet, which makes it tricky to site the different exhibits. Moving from savannahs to tropical forests to rock gardens means the surrounding walls need different textures. Part of the space will be covered with what is essentially a two-acre net made out of steel for an aviary.

Fobes has been at the zoo for 26 years. He started out in architecture doing more traditional buildings, was hired as an outside consultant for various projects, and then joined the staff. He’s been involved in designing Elephant Odyssey, Australian Outback and other major expansions.

Working for a zoo means “the architects have to put their egos in check,” he said. “The buildings are not the stars here.”

3:30 p.m. Wegeforth Bowl

The second of the day’s two “Centennial Celebration” animal shows is over, but as some kids from the audience gather at the foot of the stage for a meet-and-greet with Mickey the umbrella cockatoo, a very important performance is taking place.

The 20-something Mickey is one of Wegeforth Bowl’s trained animal ambassadors, a 30-plus group that includes everything from dogs to an Andean condor. The ambassadors make TV appearances (often with human ambassador Rick Schwarz); participate in zookeeper talks; and visit hospitals, schools and community events.

And as he follows senior animal trainer Julie Hursh’s commands to flare out his impressive crest and bob his head in a wave, Mickey is fulfilling an essential component of the ambassador-animal job description and the zoo’s conservation mandate: lobbying.

“We need to get people to care,” animal training manager Kristi Dovich says after the crowds disperse and Jake, the 29-year-old sea lion and ambassador, is showing off his still-sharp people-pleasing skills, which include rolling over and kissing on command. “Some people are cerebral and like to just look things up on the internet. But these animals hit the people who need to see the eyeball of a cockatoo or need to know what a sea lion’s whiskers feel like. People’s faces light up when they start getting it, and you can see that.”

Given the look on his face as he bounds up the Wegeforth Bowl stairs, there is probably no need to ask 8-year-old Dylan Colby if his encounter with Mickey had the desired impact. But he is happy to share.

“The good part is seeing an animal’s eyes,” he says, as grandmother Elinor Colby nods her approval. “When you look into an animal’s eyes, it sort of tells you a lot about them. His eyes tell me that he likes to play.”

5:30 p.m. Evening keepers

In the zoo’s Urban Jungle area, senior keeper Doug Kresl can set his watch by his rhinos.

“It’s like clockwork,” said Kresl, one of four keepers who start their shifts in the late afternoon and are in charge of animal bedtimes. “They are very food-motivated, just like me. They are creatures of habit. By 8 p.m., they are right at their bedroom door, waiting for their treats. We love spoiling our animals.”

Kresl has been at the zoo for 23 years. His evening-keeper duties include supervising the public giraffe-feeding, in which visitors pay $10 for the singular experience of feeding primate biscuits to the giraffes; giving Silver, the 23-year-old giraffe his osteoarthritis medicine; giving the animals access to their bedrooms but not letting them turn in too early; and occasionally fishing dropped maps, hats and cellphones out of the koala exhibit.

Kresl loves having a shift that lets him sleep in and watch cartoons, and while he is not supposed to play favorites, he also loves having a job that lets him live out every kid’s Saturday-matinee fantasy.

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the giraffes, but I love the rhinos. They love being scratched. You’d think with their big, thick hides you could just bounce stuff off of them, but they are quite sensitive. If you start rubbing their bellies just right, their legs become all rubbery. It’s like Godzilla falling over.”

Over at Elephant Odyssey, senior keeper Steve Hebert is not planning on rubbing any bellies anytime soon. He has been working with lions Etosha (the feisty female) and M’bari (the commanding male) since they came to the Safari Park 12 years ago and stayed with them when they were relocated to the zoo in 2009. But just because Hebert has known the lions since they were cubs (and M’bari will let Hebert scratch his luxurious mane and grab his tail ) does not mean the man is totally at ease with the beast.

“They grow so quickly. They will remind keepers that they are wild animals, they are not your pet,” said Hebert, who is also in charge of getting the elephants situated for the evening. “If I was in there with them, I am certain I would be on the menu.”

As he lounges atop one of his enclosure’s flat rocks, M’bari looks about as threatening as a gift-shop stuffed animal. Etosha may sleep 19 hours a day, but M’bari likes a nice solid 21. They do a lot of their roaming after dusk, although they are usually both in their climate-controlled bedrooms by morning. Then it is on to another day of more sleeping.

But as the sun edges toward setting and a cool breeze kicks up, there is activity atop the rock. M’bari stirs, and to the delight of the assembled visitors, he wakes up, shakes himself and lets out a string of MGM-worthy roars. Then he flops down, clearly exhausted by the lion’s version of a good day’s work.

“If you get 40 minutes where he is active, it’s a good day,” Hebert says. “Being the King of Beasts requires a good deal of rest to compose yourself.”

View the Video Zookeeper talks about lions at Elephant Odyssey

8 p.m. Nighttime Zoo

Tonight, Tom Peterson is a giraffe. In a couple of weeks, he will be a lion’s head, and there is a flamingo in his future. Peterson is an acrobat and a member of “The Journey,” an evening parade of walking puppets created for the Nighttime Zoo’s summer-evening festivities. This is his time to shine.

For the evening parade, which kicks off 30 minutes before closing, the 40-year-old Peterson marches jauntily with a towering giraffe neck and head strapped to his back. He uses a stick to make the neck and head bob and dip, much to the delight of the kids in the crowd, even when the giraffe looks like he’s about to eat their popcorn. The giraffe head is top-heavy, which takes its toll on Peterson’s lower back. But for the trained acrobat and veterinarian technician, this seasonal job is a little slice of employment heaven.

“I love being with animals and I love being an acrobat, so this is the perfect job,” Peterson says. “I get to come in early and look at the animals, and then I walk to work.”

During Nighttime Zoo hours, the park is open until 8 or 9 p.m., depending on the date. On this particular evening, the majority of the forty-plus Skyfari sky-tram buckets have been stowed in the barn by 8:15. All day long, operations manager Richard Diosdado and his crew have been getting people in and out of the buckets and retrieving the sunglasses, cellphones and wallets they inevitably leave behind. Diosdado has been working at the zoo for 31 years, and while he would love it if kids would stop spitting over the side of the Skyfari buckets, the decades have not made him immune to the power of the aerial zoo view.

“You can see the Coronado Bridge from up here. You can see their airplanes coming in, which is cool,” says Diosdado, who also manages the Balboa Park Railroad. “You can see the gorillas and the elephants. If you look down just as you are coming over the third tower, you can see the pandas. And you can see the lights of Petco Park. I like that because I like baseball.”

It is 8:30 p.m. now, and the San Diego Zoo is closed for the night. The journey from the Skyfari barn to the exit goes past the lion enclosure, where Etoshi and M’bari are surveying their kingdom from the back fence. Etoshi’s head is turned to the left, M’bari is facing right. Still regal, even when no one is looking.

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