Like some cockeyed vaudevillian comic in a loud suit and a funny hat, Cookie, an old cockatoo, always has relied on exaggerated showiness and a raucous line of patter to attract attention.
In the language of show business, he has never been top banana at Brookfield Zoo. Animal stars usually are the regal and spectacular big mammals for whom celebrity and drawing power comes easily. Elephants. Dolphins. Great apes. Walruses. Giraffes.
Thursday morning, when Brookfield celebrates the 60th anniversary of the first day it opened its gates to the public, Cookie will have a claim to fame that the poster boy and pinup girl animals will never have.
Cookie is the only animal left at the zoo who was there the day it opened, June 30, 1934.
Only a few animal species have normal lifespans that would allow them to hang around long enough to celebrate a 60th anniversary.
The zoo has invited older members of one of those long-lived species, humans, to attend a reception at 2 p.m. Thursday if they were at zoo for the 1934 opening “or during the first couple years the zoo was opened.”
Should any of those old-timers get over to the Perching Bird House to look in on Cookie in his glass-fronted cage, they’ll see him doing the same song and dance schtick he was doing in 1934.
He is a Leadbeater’s, or pink, Cockatoo from the vast, arid grasslands of the Australian interior, a bird considered the most beautiful of all cockatoos. An endangered species, they also are considered the most cantankerous of all parrots, birds who command a great deal of respect and caution from their keepers.
But in a zoo setting, pink cockatoos love an audience.
You might stop in front of Cookie’s cage just to admire his gorgeous coat of pink feathers. If so, it’s quite likely that he’ll start squawking and whistling. Sometimes he bobs his head in a figure-8 pattern, sometimes he stares at you with his head curiously turned upside down.
If you really interest him, he’ll do his courtship displays. That entails raising the feathers on the crown of his head, showing off a dazzling crest resembling a colorful Native American headdress, and spreading his wings as if to model his feathers.
“He’s quite a showman,” said his current keeper, Gail Perkins, the bird house curator. “He knows how to please a crowd.”
The knowledgeable, she said, will call out Cookie’s name, and he will respond, squawking out “Cookie,” or “Cookie-coo” or a shrill “Hi.” The unwary will bend over and try to talk with him through air vents at the bottom of his cage, inviting the bird to display a more sinister side of his nature.
“He gets right down there and lets out an ear-piercing shriek that will raise the hair on the back of your neck. It’s like a very, very loud train whistle, but very high-pitched,” she said.
Cookie apparently has always been that way.
Ralph Small, now 72 and retired outside Tucson, hitchhiked from his parents’ Mundelein home to Brookfield for his first visit to the zoo in 1935 when he was 13 years old. The animal he most liked in that first visit, he said, was Cookie.
“I just was fascinated by parrots in those days,” said Small in a telephone interview this week. “I still am. But Cookie caught my eye, because he liked to `display,’ to put up his crest and show it off. He’s always been a showoff.”
Small vowed then that he would one day work in a zoo, and in 1946 he went to work for Brookfield, retiring in 1982.
For nine years, he was the keeper of the bird house, from 1961 to 1970.
Keepers have to be careful around pink cockatoos, he said. Though they’re only about a foot long and weigh less than a pound, they have irascible natures and wickedly sharp and powerful beaks.
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When keepers have to stick a hand into Cookie’s cage to clean it or leave food, they have to be careful that he can’t easily stretch out and nip them. He could sever a finger or bite so deeply that the wound would require many stitches.
As Small remembers it, Cookie came to the zoo as a gift from Australia along with four other males and four females. That was when pink cockatoos were plentiful in the wild, but since then, ranchers and farmers have been destroying their natural habitat, making them a rare and endangered species.
The other pink cockatoos, which are monogamous, paired off, Small said.
Cookie, who he said never much got along with the others, lived alone through the years, first in the original bird house, then in the Children’s Zoo, and for the past few years, in the Perching Bird House.
The zoo has had five directors in Cookie’s time, and he has had hundreds of keepers.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that he is the lone survivor of Brookfield’s original cast of animals.
Though zoo animals, safe from predators and benefiting from modern medicine, live roughly twice as long as their wild counterparts, few live for 60 years.
Elephants can live to be 60 or so, but none of the zoo’s original elephants has survived. Certain turtles and tortoises can live more than 100 years, and the zoo had a huge old alligator snapping turtle of indeterminate age when it opened, but he died of old age in the late 1980s.
A few other species of birds can live into their 60s, too, most of them, like cockatoos, from the parrot family.
An African flamingo at Brookfield is about 60 years old, but it didn’t arrive at the zoo until 1935.
While never a “star,” Cookie always has had a devoted following among regular zoo visitors. Small found that out in 1977, when the zoo started an “adopt-an-animal” program to raise money to feed individual animals.
“I liked the bird so much, that even though I worked at the zoo, I figured I’d `adopt’ Cookie myself, him being one of the original animals at Brookfield and all,” Small said. “But the office told me some family had already beat me to it.”
That was the family of Jerry and Joan Shotola, who lived a mile away in La Grange Park. While they were raising their three children, they were at the zoo constantly, said Joan Shotola. Her daughter and one of her sons worked at the zoo while they were in high school.
Her daughter was working in the Children’s Zoo in 1977, Joan Shotola said, and talked her late husband into “adopting” Cookie.
Since her husband died, she has kept up with the annual adoption payments, now about $25 a year for his seeds, parrot pellets, cut fruits and vegetables and his favorite treats, corn on the cob and peanuts in the shell.
“Cookie’s just part of the family now,” said Shotola, who works as a zoo volunteer a couple of times a month.
“I keep his picture in the album with the grandchildren’s. I see him whenever I’m there, and when the grandchildren are in town, I take them over to see him.
“I feel responsible for him. He’s at least a year older than me, but he may outlive me. I might have to make provision in my will for him.”