Brookfield Zoo Director George Rabb remembers being 5 years old and watching long lines of carpenter ants marching in orderly files up and down a huge oak in his grandparents’ front yard in Lumberton, N.C.
Curious, he began putting objects in their way, to see what new paths they would take, cocking his head to listen.
“I imagined I could hear these carpenter ants speaking to one another,” Rabb said last week.
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Curiosity about the natural world remains a passion for Rabb, 71, and it has taken him down some remarkable paths of his own. Now he is setting a new course for himself, and he recently asked the zoo’s board of directors to “outline a plan of action” to find his successor and prepare for his retirement.
Such an outline is Rabb’s way of telling his board that it must decide what kind of zoo it wants in the future before it can look for the right person to take over, probably next year. He hopes, of course, that the board will want to move the zoo in the same direction he has led it for 25 years, building it into an internationally known center for conservation and research.
It might surprise most of Brookfield’s 2 million annual visitors, but Rabb, a small, quiet, unpretentious man nearly invisible to the public, is for people who work in zoos perhaps the most admired and well-known zookeeper in the world.
“There isn’t any active zoo director at this time, nationally or internationally, who would dispute that George Rabb is the silverback of zoo leaders,” said Bill Conway, retired director of the Bronx Zoo.
In the animal kingdom, a “silverback” is a dominant male gorilla, the all-powerful chieftain of his family.
That description hardly seems apt for Rabb, who is almost painfully shy, a trait people sometimes mistake for gruffness or grumpiness.
But Rabb has quietly used his position of dominance to remake not just his own zoo, but to push zoos worldwide to recast themselves as research and conservation centers, taking an activist role in staving off the extinction of thousands of species.
“He is more revered internationally than he is locally because of his work with the Species Survival Commission at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature,” said Kevin Bell, director at Lincoln Park Zoo. “He brought a great deal of leadership to the IUCN, making sure that U.S. zoos were aware of it and would participate in species survival efforts.”
Career spans decades
Species survival was hardly a blip on anybody’s radar screen on Nov. 1, 1956, when Rabb arrived for his first day of work at Brookfield.
Rabb was himself a rare zoo bird. Having just got his doctorate in zoology from the University of Michigan, he was hired as research curator, one of the first PhD scientists ever to work for a zoo.
At the time, most zoos were little more than menageries, animals on display for their entertainment value.
If the animals died at ages much younger than they would in the wild, it didn’t matter. They were easily replaced by capturing more from the wild.
Rabb’s arrival at Brookfield marked a change, as zoos began to realize that the once limitless supply of animals was dwindling with disappearing wilderness habitats worldwide.
Before he took over as director in 1976, Rabb spent 20 years prodding the zoo to take on research in such areas as population biology, animal nutrition and dolphin and baboon behavior. He also became a passionate advocate for educating the public about the natural world as the zoo’s primary mission.
“We are living in another extinction crisis, seeing the destruction of thousands of plant and animal species, mostly as the result of human intrusion,” he said.
“With most people now growing up in urban areas, where else but a zoo or aquarium is there a better classroom to let people see and touch nature and learn about how their lives touch upon the natural world?”
From oceans to tropics
Since he became director, he has nearly rebuilt the 216-acre zoo, introducing new ways of showing and teaching nature with path-breaking exhibits.
In the late 1970s, he opened the enormous Tropic World pavilion, one of the world’s first–and now much imitated–zoo “immersion” exhibits, showing multiple species living side by side in realistic natural habitats.
That has been followed by themed exhibits for dolphins, swamp and coastal creatures, and African forests and savannas.
Internationally, Rabb has become a high-profile leader in the Geneva-based IUCN. From 1989 to 1996, he was chairman of the conservation union’s Species Survival Commission, a key group that determines when an animal species has become endangered and mobilizes plans and efforts to protect it.
“He was a visionary leader, respected worldwide,” said Simon Stuart, acting director general of the IUCN, a British biologist who worked as head of the Species Survival Commission’s professional staff under Rabb.
“George stood above the fray when everybody else around him squabbled over policy issues,” Stuart said. “He is a shy, quiet man with incredible leadership skill on the big issues.”
Grass-roots effort gets a push
Rabb’s international and national responsibilities had him on the road so much that his staff at Brookfield sometimes jokingly called him their “visiting director.”
“In fact,” Rabb said, “people overseas knew me so much as a conservationist that they would ask me what our zoo was doing at home in the way of conservation. It embarrassed me deeply to admit to them that we weren’t doing very much.”
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He changed that in the 1980s, when a consortium of local conservation-minded groups founded Chicago Wilderness, dedicated to grass-roots work to preserve wild remnants of woodlands, wetlands and prairies in the Chicago area.
Brookfield was a founding member of Chicago Wilderness, and Rabb has become one of its outspoken champions as it has emerged as an internationally acclaimed model for habitat conservation on a local scale.
Acclaim is something Rabb has gotten used to in the last few years. There are few zoological honors left that he has not won.
“I think George is just fully committed to work,” said Lester Fisher, retired director of Lincoln Park Zoo. “I have never seen him playing. The one thing he loves outside work is to cook. He is a gourmet, a true epicure.”
Rabb is cautious about discussing his own retirement plans.
“I am not going to say that I am retiring at such and such a date,” he said, “because no date has been set.
“You don’t just put an ad in the newspaper to fill a job like this. By this time next year, we should be closer to knowing what direction the zoo is going in and when I will be stepping down.”
Sharing childhood interests
Meanwhile, Rabb, who cocked his head as a 5-year-old to listen to the imagined talk of carpenter ants, now cocks it to hear the real talk of a new generation of 5-year-olds.
The children are test groups that the zoo has invited to try out the attractions of its newest exhibit, the $7.9 million Children’s Play Zoo, opening June 14. Designed to attract kids from infancy to age 10, the 55,000-square-foot complex gives children a hands-on opportunity to touch animals and plants and experience what goes into taking care of living things.
“We need to know more about the cognitive, emotional and behavioral dimensions of human caring,” Rabb said.
“We know children when they see our animals in our exhibits at least on a momentary level care about them, but we need to understand what might make them care for them, to be deeply concerned and committed to the survival of other living things.”