In the Elephant House, Jeb's staff includes Tom, Bob, and Steve—three very big men. They care for the zoo's seven elephants, three males and four females. The females are social and will hang together, but the males each stay off alone unless it's time to mate. In 2002 the zoo's most famous elephant, Packy, celebrated his fortieth birthday. Krista Swan, the zoo's event coordinator, says, "Picture this fourteen-thousand-pound elephant eating a cake frosted with peanut butter, with raw carrots as candles, while thousands of people sing 'Happy Birthday,' all of them wearing huge, floppy elephant ears made of recycled paper." She says, "Elephants communicate by moving their ears. God only knows what Packy thought they were all saying to each other."
Elephants can live for sixty or more years. Keep April 14 free, and you too can wear the big ears and sing to Packy.
The zoo's smallest elephant is Chendra (meaning "Bird of Paradise" in Malay), an Asian elephant who was just a calf when she and her mother raided a Malaysian palm oil plantation. Her mother was shot dead, and Chendra was blinded in one eye and maimed in one leg. She was kept in a children's school until she was too big, then moved to Portland, where the zoo hoped she'd become best friends with Rose-Tu, another female Asian elephant the same age. The problem is, Rose-Tu is the daughter of Me-Tu and Hugo. "Rose-Tu is a brat," Krista says. "And she just harasses Chendra." Rose-Tu's favorite attack is to grab Chendra's tail. She'll hold the tail tight between her rear legs and reach back with her trunk to pluck out the tail's sensitive black hairs.
"At first," Krista says, "people talked about writing a series of children's books about Chendra and her best friend Rose-Tu... Then they thought: maybe not..."
Jeb doesn't worry. "Rose-Tu's a healthy kid," he says. "She's pushing and prodding her environment."
Chendra, he says, is a "pocket elephant," from a landlocked population of genetically unique elephants, and she'll probably be a smaller adult. Her blind eye is filled with pink and white muscle. Her good eye is brown and may turn a bright gold in maturity. She's only one ton, while Rose-Tu at the same age is two tons.
"I don't know why," Jeb says, "but they gave Chendra my birthday, February 20, so she's a Pisces."
About Hugo, Jeb Barsh says, "He's the 'Anti-Packy.' Some people call him 'Hugo the Horrible,' but he's my favorite bull. He's got such an energy field when you're with him. He's like a hot rock!" Jeb says, "He is the truth! He's energy personified! He's a hot daddy! He's a ride in a fast car!"
Hugo was captured in Thailand at about age four, and came to Portland via another zoo and a circus. "Everything I could say about Packy," Jeb says, "you could say the opposite about Hugo."
Hugo has a straight tail. Packy and all his descendants have a genetic trait for crooked tails. As a young elephant the tip of Hugo's trunk—equivalent to a human's thumb— was bitten off, so he's a little clumsy at grabbing items.
Jeb, Tom, Bob, and Steve explain how elephants walk on just the tip of their toes, protecting the sensitive pad in the center of their feet. They can stop a rolling apple without bruising it. Their trunks have forty thousand muscles, and can weigh five hundred pounds and hold five gallons of water. Each elephant has only four teeth, all of them huge. They go through six sets of these teeth and typically die of starvation after wearing out the last set. Up to 80 percent of their communication is via "infrasound," subaudible sounds that for years led people to think elephants had ESP and could read each other's minds.
"An elephant's brain is four and a half times bigger than mine," Jeb says. "It's fifty percent more convoluted, so they're incredible problem solvers." He explains, "The elephant's brain has all these pathways for storing memory. As herbivores they don't need to be 'wily.'" One reason why elephants carry so much memory is because they're so destructive to their environment that they need to constantly know where to find more food.
"They're touchingly similar to human beings," Jeb says. "They show a great deal of affection for each other. They're curious. They stay together as a family unit and won't abandon an elderly member. They even seem to mourn the death of each other."
Asian elephants have been crowded out of their habitat for centuries, and now only forty thousand are left in the world. As a pragmatist, Jeb Barsh talks about Charles Darwin's idea that extinction is a natural, acceptable event. And maybe there is no more place for these huge, charismatic animals that require so many resources to live.
About the Portland zoo, Jeb says, "This isn't Utopia, but for them there is no Utopia left."
At THE Zoo
If you want to see animals and not people, go to the zoo early and come in the cool spring or fall. According to Krista Swan, event coordinator for the Oregon Zoo, most of the animals are "corpuscular," meaning they're most active at dawn or dusk. Before the zoo opens at nine, the keepers hold the animals backstage while they clean each exhibit. At nine the animals are released into their fresh habitats and are most likely to be active and awake.
Knights Boulevard, in front of the Oregon Zoo, is named for Dr. Richard Knight, a former sailor who ran a drugstore on SW Morrison Street near Third Avenue. For sailing ships a pet was an important mascot, usually a monkey or a parrot. Sailors would leave their pets with Knight and never return for them. In 1885, Knight fenced the vacant lot next to his store, bought a grizzly bear for $75 and a cinnamon bear for $50, named them Brown and Grace, and started a zoo. In 1887 he donated his menagerie to the city, but he still had to feed and clean the animals, which were kept in the cages of a failed traveling circus, on forty acres the city set aside as City Park. By 1893 the park inventory included "3 wheelbarrows, 1 auger (bad order), 1 pump, 6 deer, 5 axes, 1 grindstone, 2 padlocks, 1 force pump, 1 grizzly bear, 300 flower pots, 1 seal."
Unless you want to see crowds of irritable people, do not come to the zoo in the hot summer months. Do not drive your car. Parking is limited and people will circle forever before they park, then buy a ticket and walk through the gate very cranky. Instead, take the westside MAX train. Park downtown, or park in the western suburb park-and-ride lots (in Beaverton or Hillsboro) along the MAX line. Get off at the zoo stop and ride the elevator up. For another good train ride, park at the Washington Park Rose Garden and walk to the hillside zoo train station. You can avoid the crowd and buy your ticket here, then ride the miniature Wild West steam train or the streamlined retro-aluminum Zoo Liner through the forest and into the center of the zoo.
If you can't handle the morning, bring a picnic lunch and a blanket and come for a concert in the evening. After April 1 check out www.oregonzoo.org for each summer season of twenty-five concerts, including artists like Ray Charles, the Cowboy Junkies, and Los Lobos.
Here are some animals you absolutely must meet.
The Penguins: Look for Mochika, a Humbolt penguin who refuses to mate or build a nest despite the keepers' best efforts. Instead, he hangs out in the keepers' kitchen. The keepers wonder if it's because he has a feminine name, but instead of another penguin—male or female—Mochika loves men's black boots. "I mean he really likes boots," Krista says. "In the biblical sense, he knows boots. You can feed him a fish, but you always have to watch out for your shoes."
The Sea Otters: Look for Thelma and Eddy. Like all southern sea otters from the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, they're named for characters in John Steinbeck novels. They live on an annual $25,000 diet of fresh mussels, clams, crab, and other shellfish. When they were placed in the new exhibit, keepers thought they were too young to mate. "Then Thelma turned up pregnant," says Krista. Thelma's pup is the first southern sea otter pup to be born and survive in captivity. Now zoos are hounding Portland. "It's a little embarrassing. They keep asking us what we did differently," Krista says. "The truth is, we don't know. We did it without even trying."