It didn’t with these cassowaries. We had to actually go in, push them apart. Fortunately, they didn’t… She was the aggressor, she was the biggest one as is the case in cassowaries. And she did not attack us, she was really heavily injuring him and there was some bleeding, but… Read More
And as is the procedure, a breeding procedure with cassowaries, the males do all of the incubation, 100%, and all of the care of the chick. The females role in raising cassowaries is only to lay a fertilized egg. And then after she lays a clutch, the male puts them… Read More
We put the one whose gender we didn’t know in with her by opening a door, he wandered in, we fed them heavily before. So hopefully, they’d become somewhat lethargic. We had two weapons. One is a strong fire hose standing by and manned by one of the keepers. And… Read More
We were very fortunate and we had a great beginning because this fellow that ran the bird park, E.X. Lewis, had brought back a bunch of cassowaries, and cassowaries, when they’re as big as chickens, as tiny chicks, are very hardy, and light and simple to transport, and not dangerous… Read More
The concrete floor was removed, turned into grass, And in Congress, as it appeared, cassowaries were living behind three quarter-inch bars, but they were thriving mostly on a diet of chopped bananas. But the caretaker that took over after the bird park, superintendent, had been reluctant to ever put them… Read More
Not very much. I was never on a committee, and there was one western conference I attended at Fresno. And at that time, regional conferences were carried out. I was never an anti AZA, but I was never a powerful supporter. That was, of course, before accreditation was necessary. I… Read More
Were you able to breed cassowaries?… Read More
So you were involved in a ZPA when you were director?… Read More
And this was in early days when postcards did not reveal. You did not see nude postcards and nude pictures of semi-naked ladies at the corner drug store. So he asked me with a kind of a smile and a little bit of embarrassment about pictures of Hawaiian ladies that… Read More
So he said, yeah. So he reached way down under the counter and brought these slides up of Hawaiian ladies provocatively dressed in only a graph skirt, leaning against a coconut tree, swimming, emerging from the ocean and coming out of the beach. And Bernard said, “Those are great.” I… Read More
I did, and what, I never had a day off. And my success for Jack Throp began to take a day off so people could expect him not to be there. I would never check time clock, never do a daily work report or anything as the keepers are required… Read More
Give me one example, one example of a remarkable person that sticks in your mind. Bernard Jimmy. Bernard had, in addition to editing this marvelous encyclopedia of animals, Bernard had a TV show program like Marlon Perkins, well, an animal-based television show in Germany. I’ve been told, I’ve not seen… Read More
And I didn’t ask for things that were unreasonable. I supported the keepers as much as I could, and they knew that. I didn’t have to (indistinct), and I just said, hey, we’re making this submission to increase the salaries. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, let’s do… Read More
Now, you mentioned that the zoo wasn’t really large, but did you make rounds every day?… Read More
With the technicians and with the boss, the civil service commissioners that were just people, people that the head, the chief of the civil service commission was a plantation owner that had salt water aquariums, just as I did. And we’d skin dive in the same place to catch salt… Read More
And in that way, it made me feel comfortable that the responsibility was on my shoulders, but essentially, the buck stopped there and I’m not going around anybody else but through the proper supervisory chains of command that we had established. Even though it was a small zoo, it was… Read More
And like when we began at the zoo, she had a blank slate with the only mammals that, a few monkeys and the goats. There was no real hazard factor, except the cassowaries were hazardous birds to be around, that’s for sure. But beyond that, there were no zookeepers. They… Read More
And how’s your stock doing?… Read More
But in all my years, I never gave instructions to any keeper, ever, unless he was the one person on those animal trips that we made on ships. Of those seven trips on ships, three of them, I had one supervisor keeper along. The other four, I made alone. But… Read More
Be pleasant to everybody on the staff, be perfectly happy to ask how they’re feeling and it’s a nice day, isn’t it?… Read More