By LESLIE KAUFMAN
St. Louis ZooA Humboldt penguin at a breeding colony in Punta San Juan, Peru.
The brother and sister waddled up, unperturbed, allowing their rubbery coats to be stroked and occasionally letting out a formidable braying sound as a greeting. Except for an occasional jet of guano, they were delightful. That’s why the St. Louis Zoo casts the animals as “ambassadors” and has them meet with schoolchildren, visiting dignitaries and, most important, donors.
Zoos frequently describe their live collections as a way of educating people about the animals’ struggling kin in the wild — and of raising money to protect them and their natural habitats
There are still roughly 60,000 Humboldts left along the coasts of Peru and Chile, but the bird numbers are steeply lower than late-19th-century levels of a million or more. One important reason is that their guano, which builds up in thick layers as it dries, is valuable to villagers in those countries. Penguins use it to build their nests; people come in and strip-mine the guano to sell as valuable fertilizer.
Working with a consortium of zoos and conservation groups, the St. Louis Zoo has helped persuade Peru to declare Punta San Juan, the home of the largest remaining penguin breeding colony, a park reserve. The campaign also led to the adoption of a policy under which guano can be harvested only every five to seven years.
The program costs money. The St. Louis Zoo alone now sends $60,000 a year to the reserve to help pay for guards who enforce policies. The zoo also sends a rotation of its own keepers to do health assessments on the penguins, taking blood and checking vital signs. This is vital, zoo officials say, because it would be devastating to the species if an outbreak of disease wiped out the colony.
St. Louis Zoo officials have decided that spending more money on a few selected programs is a better way of helping endangered species than spending less on many projects.
When Jeffrey Bonner became St. Louis’s president and chief executive in 2002, the zoo had over 100 programs to assist conservation in the wild. Most of the programs received $1,000 to $10,000 a year, barely enough to make a difference. He had his staff choose just 12. In the last year, the zoo split $844,000 among these programs.
“Instead of making a little difference in a lot of places,” Dr. Bonner wrote, “we are making a profound and lasting difference in a few places.”
Here’s an entertaining video from the zoo about the penguin conservation effort in Punta San Juan.
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