Memories of Ted Reed, Part 2

Another installment from my presentation at the National Zoo last month.

The Clash of the Cultures – academics and managers

Ted Reed hired a top notch staff. The National Zoo in the 1970s probably had more Ph Ds than any other American zoo. 

But Ted had created a 600 lb gorilla. 

His scientists were free-thinkers, could "pile it higher and deeper" than most zoo folk, often disagreed with each other, and could be relied upon to question the Director's decisions.

The zoo's Academics were from the University of Free Thought, and its Managers were from an altogether different universe.  

The clash was about the quest for truth versus the quest for organizational wellness.

Ted wasn't used to the ways of the zoo's new academic culture.

One of the freethinkers was Professor Edwin Gould, who had quit his job at Johns Hopkins University to become the zoo's Curator of Mammals.

Ed Gould, in field garb in Canada
late 70s.

At the time there was an arthritic and tired old Bruin at the zoo named Smokey the Bear.

The iconic Smokey roused the Professor's deepest sentiments, and true to his academic upbringing Ed wanted to air his feelings with the Director.

He made an appointment with the Director, and shared his views about the lessons of wildfire in the American west, about fire ecology, and about the misguided policy of the US Forest Service.

He finished his discourse with a zinger: “We all we know it’s a lie.”

Ted had listened patiently.

“Gould, forget about Smokey. Smokey’s a big hit with the visitors and the Congress, and he’s here to stay. Go back to your office and think of some neat animals we can get for the public.”

Walking back to his office, Gould could only chuckle at the Director's skillful dismissal.

The Problematic issue of Species Selection

Selecting species for the newly acquired Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, Virginia, was often more contentious than Smokey's presence in DC.

Dr Reed convened a CRC planning committee and monthly meetings were held at the center.

The committee selected the Pere David’s deer as the first species to go to the center.

Aaron, in full rut, one of the first Pere David's deer at the
National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center. 

They had bred themselves out of space at the zoo, and moving animals to Front Royal solved the zoo's surplus deer problem.

The Scimitar horned oryx was the second species selected.

Scimitar-horned oryx at CRC in the mid 1970s. SNZP photo.

  

Then Dr Reed threw in a wild card – Bactrian camels, and the staff grumbled. The zoo didn't have Bactrian camels, and what's more, captive "Bactrians" are domesticated.

Ted didn’t care. Bactrian camels were uncommon in zoos at the time, and they were a “bread and butter” species. When mom and dad took the kids to the zoo, one of their expectations was to see camels.

Ted wasn’t to be deterred, and I am glad he stood his ground.

Meade Barn, the Bactrian camel facility

Meade Barn was retrofitted for camels, and the new camel herd arrived from the Minnesota Zoo with fanfare.

The Governor of Minnesota and his selected staff arrived by helicopter, and Dr Reed and a few NZP staff  attended the ceremony at Meade Barn.

We actually received two breeding males, Humphrey, named for a popular country hit by Blanchard and Morgan, and the small-bodied Jimmy,

Even with 30 acres to explore, Jimmy spent all his time trudging a small figure 8 in the turf. He was totally deranged, and a sad example of what happens when animals are penned up in small enclosures.

But Humphrey showed all the promise of a breeding male.

The magnificent Humphrey.

During the winter rutting season he urinated on his tail and flapped it on his rear hump, and rubbed the coffee-colored fluid from his poll gland on the front hump.

Humphrey was also assertive and challenging to other camels, another sign of the testosteronized male.

Our opinions about Bactrian camels quickly changed.

They were cool mega-mammals, and charismatic in their own distinctive way. We started collecting data.

  

Humphrey takes on a rival. 

A year passed. When Dr Reed visited the center he wanted to see camels first, and asked when we were going to have babies.

Humphrey wasn't delivering the goods, so we organized an observation team to monitor breeding activity.

The research team that monitored reproductive behavior of the camel herd. 

Then our veterinarian, Mitch Bush, and colleagues examined Humphrey more closely and attempted to collect semen.

They discovered that our stud "shot blanks".

Despite his macho appearance, his testes had never descended into the scrotum. He was cryptorchid. He was the great pretender.

Word of Humphrey's impotence soon spread to other zoos, and that year the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums (now the AZA) honored the National Zoo with four awards . . .

I was there when Ted received the award, and he played the fool artfully.

Recently, Ted's son Mark informed us that the award was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Ted believed that zoos generate enough levity without the help of special awards from the AAZPA.

He prodded the association to change their policy.

The next year AAZPA's  board of directors announced they were discontinuing the Zoo-Goof-of-the-Year-Award.  

I was disappointed with that decision, but it was one more example of the clash of the cultures.



References

Thanks to Kris Vehrs and Barbara Bueschel for locating the Associated Press clipping, to Ed Gould for sharing his memories of his early days at NZP, and to Mark Reed for filling me in on the consequences of the AAZPA's last Goof of the Year Award.

Wemmer, C. and J. Murtaugh. 1980. Olfactory aspects of rutting behavior in the Bactrian camel, Camelus bactrianus ferus. Pp 107-124 in Chemical Signals, Vertebrates and Aquatic Invertebrates (D. Muller-Schwarze et al, eds) . 

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Memories of Ted Reed

Buckminster invites the author to a sparring match (ca 1979)

There is a reason you haven't heard from me lately. 

I was busy writing my personal memories of the late Theodore H. Reed, who died last year at the age of 90. 

Ted Reed was Director of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park from 1955 to 1982, and he hired me in 1974 to work at the zoo's Conservation and Research Center.

Several colleagues joined me recently at the National Zoo to memorialize Dr. Reed and celebrate the National Zoo's 125th anniversary. 

Here's one of my anecdotes from the late 1970s.  

"In due course, the Zoo and its conservation center became destinations worth seeing, and Ted hosted visiting VIPs with a personal touch. 

One of those VIPs was the Director of the Zurich Zoo, Heini Hediger, who was well known as the father of Zoo Biology.

In those days, a curator who hadn't read Hediger's books, Man and Animal in the Zoo, and The Psychology of Animals in Zoos and Circuses hadn't done his or her homework. 

Ted had me open gates, and do "the show and tell".  

At Greenhill Barn we had a herd of young Eld's deer that had been hand-reared for studies of reproduction, and being a keen student of ungulate behavior, I demonstrated the universal signal used by deer to terminate unwanted social interaction, such as invitations to spar with the antlers. 

The basic rule is this: Don't make eye contact. Turn away and just graze or pretend to graze. 

We observed this cut-off signal many times in different species of deer.

Even a person can give the signal by turning away and plucking grass with the hand. 

On this occasion my imitation worked like a charm.

Buckminster was game for a sparring match, and followed me around poking me in the butt.

I just kept plucking grass, and soon he lost interest and started grazing.  

Ted called the next day, and asked me to get photos of the sequence with Buckminster.


Hediger had been impressed and wanted the photos for his lectures. 

"Dr. Reed, it doesn’t always work. I’m not sure he’ll do it again.” 

Ted's response? “Just get it. He did it yesterday, he’ll do it again.”  

It took a while to get those pictures, but Ted's prediction was right. 


Buckminster finally tired of horning me in the butt and started to graze.  

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The not-so-giant civet of Sulawesi--Part 1

Hauling a large live trap across the River Mewe, Sulawesi

Before I post camera trap photos of the animal, I'm giving you the background.

The Giant Civet of Sulawesi (Macrogalidia musschenbroekii) wasn't a giant at all, but we didn't know that in the mid-1970s.

To us it was a big civet from a big island with an exotic colonial name, the Celebes , located west of Wallace's Line, the sacred beat of Alfred Russell.

At the time it was known from only 11 moth-eaten and misshapen specimens with incomplete data.

That was enough to get us jazzed. We scoured the literature, but learned little more.

When we discovered that mammalogist Guy Musser of the American Museum of Natural History had logged a couple years in Sulawesi's outposts, we paid him a visit.

Musser's schtick was rats, but he knew of Macrogalidia, and took us to a cabinet down a dark hall.

The Sherman live trap is a well-known tool of the mammalogist's trade, but the one he showed us looked more like a beer can from a shooting range. 

The civet had terrorized and then eaten the live-trapped rodents on his trap line. The canine-riddled trap was a memento.

All of this was a compelling incentive to do our institutional duty: to hunt down "Macro" and "increase and diffuse knowledge".

My colleague at the National Zoo, Larry Collins, and I wrote a proposal to fund a study, and in due course we received a modest grant. It was enough to cover international and domestic travel in Indonesia, and bare necessities such as food in the field.

[Larry Collins, National Zoo mammal curator in the 70s.]

Fortunately, the National Zoo's Director, Theodore Reed recently had met the Director of the Jakarta Zoo, Benjamin Galstaun.

[Dr. Theodore H. Reed, Director of the National Zoo in the 70s]

Reed was a sole surviving son of a military family. Galstaun had been a POW of the Japanese. They had struck it off well, and Galstaun embraced the project. He offered us gratis room and board at the zoo, and travel expenses for the participation of his own staff.

Benjamin Galstaun was an unforgettable grandfatherly kind of character who shatters Yankee notions that worldly people live only in the west. 

A small bespectacled man of Armenian and Javanese parentage, he was an autodidact and an artist, fluent in 5 languages. The Kebun Binatang Ragunan, or Jakarta Zoo, was his creation, a shady green place tucked into a corner of Jakarta's sweltering sprawl.

"You can't starve here", he would say. "The fruit just falls on your head. The staff can have all they can eat." That was his paternalistic side.

Because the zoo was a success he was envied and dogged by seamy elements that harbored entrepreneurial dreams.

Why they tried was a mystery. Galstaun was an egalitarian, stubborn as a mule, and given to droll political commentaries. The zoo was invaded every morning by a battalion of widows, whom Galstaun employed as sweepers and groundskeepers. He would support the down-and-out and send his staff to collect civets, but he wouldn't lift a finger for a politico.  

He assigned his talented General Curator, Jack West as our liaison. 

[Jakarta Zoo General Curator Jack West, our liaison]

The first two trips in '78 and '79 were month-long recces.

After a week in Jakarta's traffic to get permits, Jack and I flew to Menado and then Palu, bought wire mesh, made live traps, and then bussed to some outpost where we lived with local families.

There we explored, read animal sign, collected scat, and surveyed local hunters. We recovered bones and skull fragments in kitchen middens, but caught only local Malay civets (Viverra tangalunga).

[A tranquillized Malay civet.]

In 1980, Collins, animal keeper Ken Lang, and I embarked on a 2-month expedition.

This time our field base was Dick Watling's jungle digs near Lore Lindu National Park.

[Dick Watling, then working on a management plan for Lore Lindu National Park for WWF]

We spent our time running the ridges, checking the live traps, and camera trapping. 

We caught our civet, and took it back to Jakarta. This time Galstaun met us at the airport.

I wrote in my notes, "On our ride to the zoo Galstaun told us he was no longer director of the zoo, that he was responsible for familiarizing the new director - an army general with a veterinary degree - with the zoo's operation, and that he would be retained for one year as a consultant. . ."

Several months later Jack West sent a telegram that the civet had died of distemper. That was the end of our dream to study the reproductive biology of Macrogalidia at the National Zoo. We published the data we had collected.

On a positive note, with the remaining funds from our grant Jack faithfully guided and financed a graduate student to study the civet's ecology, and a couple years later he finished his dissertation.

Postscript: Ten years later I was again in Jakarta and visited Galstaun's widow who had been allowed to remain living in the director's house.  After an hour of reminiscence she asked if I would care to have any book from her husband's library as a remembrance. I picked Hoogerwerf's "Udjung Kulon, Land of the Last Javan Rhinoceros", and she signed it over to me with a kind note.


Publications from our work in Indonesia

Wemmer, C. 1991. Lessons from a Javanese garden. ZooGoer, 20(1):10-14 

Wemmer, C. and Watling, D.  1982. Eye color polymorphism in the babirusa pig. Malayan Nature Journal , 36:135-136 

Wemmer, C. and West, J. 1982. The dermal shield of the lesser mouse deer, Tragulus javanicus. Malayan Nature Journal, 36:137-139

Wemmer, C., West, J., Watling, D., Collins, L., and Lang, K. 1983. The external characters of the Celebes palm civet, Macrogalidia musschenbrocki.  Journal of Mammalogy, 64:133-136

Wemmer, C. and Watling, D.1986. Ecology and status of the Sulawesi palm civet, Macrogalidia musschenbroeki (Schlegel). Biological Conservation, 35:1-17.