Well, we had both retired now, but we had a, a extremely good head of horticulture and a and a a, a really good head of the design department. North Carolina Zoo is very, it, it it’s endowed with an extremely skilled group of design and construct and talking about… Read More
Can you talk about how it was developed and your vision?… Read More
But one of the things that you did start that is fairly unusual in any zoological garden was the art program, Right?… Read More
So that was very impressive. The exhibits that I saw were, and of course they, they should have been right up to, you know, being only 18 years old, most of those exhibits were less than 10 years old and they were just finishing off the North America area at… Read More
Yeah, what kind of zoo did you find Gorgeous. Just very unusual for, you know, comparison to most of the zoos that, that I was familiar with. Huge sight, heavily wooded, quite hilly, but with a lot of natural features late, some of them natural, some manmade wonderful horticulture department. Read More
And I think, I think when he retired, the, the powers that be there, the depart, the environment department as it was at the time, were very keen to get somebody who had long, who had direct practical experience both in the zoo world, in the biological world in general,… Read More
So what type of zoo did you find when you went on your initial journey to Sea Zoo?… Read More
That’s a, you know, that’s a good question. I meant to, to look into that. There were two directors before me. One was Huff Bill Hoff. Bill Hoff, yeah. And he very much had to do, he, you know, he came out as, you know, came outta the zoo world… Read More
So that was, that was really my entry into, into the NC Zoo and set about finding many purposes for it very quickly. Read More
Who was the director you replaced at the North Carolina Zoo?… Read More
You know, how, how do we need to use it with the taxpayers who paid for it?… Read More
And and luckily at the time, both the, you know, the senior staff and the, the secretary and the assistant secretary, the guy, the assistant secretary was actually a lady, a woman who was responsible for the zoo and the museums in North Carolina. Both not zoologists, not biologists, but… Read More
And basically an open book as far as where do we take this place?… Read More
And that’s how that all happened. But it was very much, very much through the zoo world, knowing, knowing well what was going on in the, you know, with the debate in London and, and some of my colleagues, people like John Knowles in, in the UK saying, you, you… Read More
And the agency then heard from some of our American Zoo colleagues that, oh, well that guy Jones is, you know, there are things going on at London, which you might wanna talk to him. So I got this call outta the blue from actually gov governor Jim Hunt was… Read More
And his, I had a call from his office one day in London saying, you know, would I mind coming coming to North Carolina for a long weekend and seeing if I had any interest in becoming the director of the North Carolina Zoo?… Read More
And sadly what happened was that there were a lot of loud voices within the scientific fellowship who, for their own agendas, some of, some of the leadership actually were people who had applied for jobs at London Zoo and were turned down for very good, for very good and… Read More
And I, and I, I’d met said, you know, probably not, not accepted well that, that the London and which they zoos needed to change, that we need to lead the way in how zoos were run, were designed with, you know, how they looked at their collections, how they… Read More
And that department is, is actually the basis, it’s the foundation of the great work that ZSL all over the world is now doing today. But with, but with a lot more support Now you have another promotion called General Director of Zoo. That’s what the CEO position was. Yeah. Read More
It was a new, new division within ZSL. The idea being that ultimately money we earned on the consultancies we’ve just talked about would be plowed back into conservation. But in the meantime, we almost completely rebuilt the, the Ungulate housing at Whipsnade on the back of what we were… Read More