A little over a year ago, during my normal duties of reporting the comings and goings at Chicago’s zoos, I discovered one of my favorite gorilla families had disappeared from Lincoln Park’s Great Ape House.
That is how I first heard of Disney World’s newest Florida theme park, Animal Kingdom. The missing ape family, led by Gino, a handsome young male silverback lowland gorilla, had moved with mates Benga and Hope, and Benga’s boy, Hasani, to the Mickey Mouse empire outside Orlando.
As the year wore on, I kept hearing of Brookfield and Lincoln Park Zoos losing some of their best animal keepers to Disney, too, about a dozen people, in all. Then last winter, the Field Museum shipped more than half of its bones from Sue, the $8.4 million Tyrannosaurus rex fossil it purchased last winter, to Animal Kingdom to be cleaned and prepared there as a part of a Disney dinosaur exhibit.
It turns out Disney collected animals, keepers and ideas from zoos and wild animal reserves all over the world to pull together Animal Kingdom. It’s a monster of a park with far too many and varied attractions to label merely a zoo, opened with great fanfare last April.
Normally I would have barely noticed the opening of yet another entertainment park. I don’t like them, and my wife doesn’t either. For years we had succeeded in fending off our now 12-year-old son’s pleas to end his intense disgrace of being the only kid he knows who has not been to Disney World.
This summer, however, my wife and I reconsidered our resolve, our curiosity tweaked by Animal Kingdom.
In four years leading to the park’s opening, the Disney Co. used its famous alchemy of design, engineering and imaginative story-telling to transform a 500-acre swatch of flat pasture into densely forested hills, ravines, rivers and savanna. Authentic African towns and wilderness outposts sprang up with them, not to mention cleverly disguised rides, theaters, restaurants and shops.
My family and I went to investigate, giving it one day out of four in Orlando, the other three devoted to Magic Kingdom, Epcot Center and the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.
Animal Kingdom didn’t entirely erase my skepticism for entertainment parks. It often seemed to me many visitors there were so concerned about getting to the next ride or theatrical show that they seldom slowed down to see the animals and beauty of the park.
But it’s hard not to be impressed with the effort Disney has put in to make Animal Kingdom unlike any of its other parks and, for, that matter, any other zoo.
Although the other Disney parks are grand, garish banquets of escapist entertainment and consumerism, the company tones down those impulses in Animal Kingdom.
Sweetly but firmly (and with great care taken never to be preachy), the new park uses its rides, shows and animal displays to deliver messages about the wonder and fragility of nature and the need for humans to take better care of the planet.
There are underlying messages, for example, about evolution and natural catastrophe even in the park’s one true thrill ride, Countdown to Extinction, a teeth-clenching indoor roller coaster that careens amongst breathtakingly believable, life-sized dinosaur robots. Messages are present, too, on the rest of the park’s far more sedate rides, excursions on trucks, trains and boats past dazzlingly natural animal exhibits.
Animal Kingdom’s various live and animated theatrical attractions are extravagant affairs that outclass most of those in Disney’s other parks. They all feature animals — real, robotic, animated drawings and actors dressed for the part. In whatever form, the animals in the shows deliver conservation messages too.
Even the park’s remarkably lush landscaping takes its turn in explaining hows, whys and wonders of nature. Disney says it assembled the four million plants it brought into Animal Kingdom from 37 states and 28 countries, including 850 species of trees, 2,000 species of shrubs and 260 types of grass.
Whatever the numbers, there is no denying that the park is intensely, densely, gloriously green, now counted as one of the biggest tropical botanic gardens in the world.
Besides being beautiful, all those trees, bushes and flowering plants have a direct and welcome benefit for park visitors, offering lots of shade as people shuffle interminably under the hot Florida sun through snaky lines waiting to get on rides and into shows.
At the center of all that foliage is a rather dumbfounding manmade Disney creation, the Tree of Life, a sculpted, concrete and steel African baobob. Standing 145 feet high, its 8,000 limbs and branches bear 103,000 handmade, unfluttering leaves. It spreads over 160 feet in diameter, sheltering a lagoon, small animal and bird habitats and a pathway leading into the tree’s 50-foot-wide trunk.
Its gnarly limbs, trunk and roots are carved with lovely likenesses of more than 300 animals, from dinosaurs, whales and rhinos to birds and insects.
One of the most popular of the park’s shows, “It’s Tough to be a Bug,” is in a 430-seat theater housed in the base of the artificial tree. A 3-D, special-effects extravaganza, the show lets insects good-naturedly get revenge on humans for treating them like loathsome, third-rate citizens of the world.
Although Animal Kingdom is as much a botanic garden as it is a zoo and amusement park, the zoo animals view the greenery much differently than do the humans. Most more traditional zoos use plants in and around animal habitats strictly for looks, keeping them off limits to the critters. Disney’s animals get to chew up the scenery.
“It’s a big old salad bar out there,” said Marty Sevenich, from Brookfield Zoo and one of a dozen or so top Chicago zoo keepers whom Disney lured to Florida to work in Animal Kingdom.
“Their favorite foods are planted out there,” said Sevenich, “and we encourage them to eat it up. If it’s all gone by the end of the day, that’s okay. Our horticulture department goes out at night and replants the favorite plants, and the next day (the animals) can eat those too.”
The nightly horticultural headache is biggest in a 110-acre area of the park devoted to the animals of Africa.
Much of that part of the park is viewable only from truck, boat and train rides through a terrain that is an astonishingly good replica of a savanna game park in Africa. Passing through, visitors see various herbivores — giraffe, buffalo, rhino, elephant, zebra, antelope — tearing up and swallowing goodly portions of their exhibits.
Keepers say visitors sometimes complain that the foliage is so thick in the animal habitats that they have trouble seeing the animals in them. That’s also one of the virtues of the place, however, because it gives animals hidden nooks and crannies to disappear into whenever the mood strikes them.
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“Guests here have to be more patient at some habitats to see the animals,” said Barbara Weber, a former Brookfield Zoo keeper who became Animal Kingdom’s senior primate keeper in January. “You have to come at different times of day if you want to make a point of seeing the gorillas.”
Though they’re all from Chicago, Weber and the Lincoln Park gorilla troop headed by Gino have come to know each other only in Orlando in the troop’s verdant, hilly, 3/4-acre forest rich with living, fruiting plants.
Being outside 365 days a year, having bananas to pluck from trees , having trees to climb or pull down as fancy strikes them all seem to suit Gino and his wives and offspring just fine.
“I’ve been around gorillas for 15 years,” said Weber, “and when I first saw Gino out here sitting in all these plants, I almost cried. Everything looked so natural and he seemed so content.”
Hope, one of Gino’s mates, was pregnant when she arrived in Florida from Chicago, and Weber said she, especially, seems to be pleased about being there. In Chicago she’d had babies taken from her by keepers because she was too inattentive.
“She gave birth here last November,” said Weber, “and she’s been a perfect, model mother ever since. I think she relaxed here.”
The Chicago zoo keepers who flew the coop to Florida joke about Disney’s underhanded recruiting methods to lure them south.
“They tend to bring keepers from northern zoos they’re interested in hiring down here for interviews and a look around in January and February,” Weber said, laughing.
But the real lure seems to be that Animal Kingdom was built as a brand new, state-of-the-art, spare-no-expense facility with a solid commitment to the animals and to research.
“The potential for research in a facility like this is so great,” said Dean Lofgren, a former Brookfield keeper who now works with animals in the Africa area, including eight hippos often viewable from an underwater window along the Gorilla Falls trail.
“One of the potentials is using this window to look into hippo social behavior. We have the perfect facility to study how they hear and communicate underwater, and we’re looking to see if they communicate in some way that is similar to what whales and dolphins do.”
In addition to living animals, Animal Kingdom devotes a lot of space and effort to long dead ones in Dinoland U.S.A., a hundred acres or so set aside for dinosaur exhibits, rides, shows and a playground where children can uncover fossils in a sand pit.
If the 90-foot Brachiosaurus skeleton that stretches over Dinoland’s entrance seems familiar, that would be because it was cast from the mold of the same skeleton that arches over Stanley Field Hall in the Field Museum.
Because so many of Dinoland’s skeletons are reproductions taken from museums around the world, the real bones of what is probably the most spectacular dinosaur fossil ever found are often overlooked by visitors.
Disney, along with McDonald’s Corp., last year contributed big money to help buy Sue, the biggest, most complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever found, purchased by the Field for $8.4 million last year. Part of the deal was that some of Sue’s bones would go to Dinoland, where scientists could work in public as they conserved and prepared the fossil.
“Chicagoans coming through here get pretty excited when they see what we’re working on,” said Bruce Schumacher, a paleontologist who heads a three-person conservation team the Field sent to Dinoland with 60 percent of Sue’s bones.
The team (like one in Chicago at the Field Museum) is removing the South Dakota rock in which the bones were fossilized 67 million years ago, doing the work behind glass in a public viewing area of a temporary fossil preparation laboratory. Non-Chicagoans who don’t know about Sue often walk away unconvinced that they have seen the real thing, said Schumacher.
“People sometimes have a hard time realizing that these are real bones,” he said. “We try to go out and talk to people at different times during the day, and sometimes we find that they think we’re just actors pretending to work, on a set made to look like a science lab.”
The disbelief of some visitors over the authenticity of Sue’s bones perhaps points to the risk Disney took in building Animal Kingdom. It is a company that primarily invents and sells myth and magic, and perhaps that’s what most people expect to see when they go to a Disney theme park.
I have no problem with that. For some, the theme park rides and hullabaloo undoubtedly are what they are looking for in Animal Kingdom. For those who look past the amusement park stuff, they’ll find Disney has put up a world class zoo and botanical garden, not to mention a first-rate dinosaur museum. That, at least, is what I found.
IF YOU GO
THE DETAILS
A one day/one-park-only ticket to any of the Disney theme parks costs $42 plus tax for adults and $34 plus tax for children (ages 3-9).
Various passes also are available to the theme parks, including a pass for guests of Walt Disney World Resort hotels (prices do not include tax.)
All-in-One-Hopper Pass: Unlimited admission to the Magic Kingdom Park, Epcot, Disney-MGM Studios, Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park, Pleasure Island and Disney’s water parks (Blizzard Beach, Typhoon Lagoon and River Country). Also includes admission to Disney’s Wide World of Sports complex for a number of days. Adults: 6-day, $249; 7-day, $274. Children (ages 3-9): 6-day, $199; 7-day, $219.
Park Hopper Pass: Five days of unlimited admission to the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney-MGM Studios and Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park. Adults, $189; children (3-9), $119.
Value Pass: One day’s admission each to the Magic Kingdom Park, Epcot, Disney-MGM Studios and Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park. Adults, $149; children (3-9), $119.
Tickets can be ordered by calling 407-W-DISNEY or purchased on line at www.disney.com