Collateral Wildlife

Whenever I visit zoos, I like to look for the incidental animals; the animals and birds and fish that are there because they have moved in unbidden, because a zoo is a nice place to live, even when you have a choice. I like to see how the local wildlife, native or not, exploits the zoo environment. Maybe there's a scruffy little gang of house sparrows stealing food out of a fox's dish or picking grain out of zebra dung. Maybe there's a complex of Norway rat tunnels running under the tiger's pen.

Maybe there's a cottontail rabbit, hiding under the shrubbery that screens the chimp compound.

Maybe there's a giant Canada goose, product of an aggressive stocking program and now an overabundant resident year-round throughout much of the U.S., hoping for a handout.

Maybe there's a shadow under a mallard, that shadow resolving into a huge carp.

The mallard, a native species that gladly exploits easy resources, is here because people throw food around at zoos.

The carp, a European exotic that has invaded virtually every slow-moving waterway in North America, is here because it's hoping the mallards will miss the bread people are bound to throw to them. We have come to an uneasy peace with this big, mud-plain fish. There's no getting rid of it now.
The carp beseech me for food. There's no question in my mind that they're looking right into my eyes, begging. I have lived with their gaudy cultivars, the koi, long enough to know that look. It's pretty darned effective, for a fish.

I think about the giant Asian carp, a different and even more damaging species, now trying to make a beachhead in Lake Michigan, about the frantic efforts to turn them away from this precious, as yet Asian carp-free inland sea. Lawsuits are being brought by Ohio, Minnesota and Michigan to close a Chicago lock system that will, no matter how much we shock or poison it, inevitably allow them entry into the Great Lakes. These huge fish leap en masse from the water when a boat passes by, and have killed people unfortunate enough to be hit by their giant bodies. They make deserts of lakes and rivers by vacuuming up all the plankton and collapsing the food chain. They make sure that nothing survives but Asian carp, wherever they occur. Chicago is going to have to figure out how to transport goods by land, it seems. The environmental cost of having an open passage between Illinois' Asian carp-infested waters and Lake Michigan is simply tremendous, and entirely unacceptable. I wish my state luck in bringing pressure to bear on Chicago to close the locks before it's too late. I do not want to see Lake Erie seething with Asian carp, and no one else does, too. But this is the nature of aquatic exotics: they are incorrigible, unstoppable. The least we can do is seal off the obvious points of entry. And hope there's no one stupid or sick enough to introduce them on purpose.


These are European carp, but you get the point.

A ring-billed gull also waits for a handout. Populations of this little native gull exploded with the inception of landfills and shopping centers, strip malls, fast-food places and open Dumpsters. And it's almost single-handedly cleaned out native nesting piping plovers in the Great Lakes.

Lovely bird, just doing its job.


Outside the zoo gates, a low-paid person in a dog suit shills for Petland, hoping to lure people in to buy the tragic output of puppy mills.

Sometimes I wish I could stop thinking about connections, about collateral damage. Why can't I just look at the pretty birds, the big fish, the cute puppies? Why must I see the clumsy hand of man laid so heavily on the animal kingdom wherever I look?

What's that on the Chinese Christmas light string on the Japanese birches near the Asian elephant compound?

Why, it's a ruby-crowned kinglet. A native migrant, passing through Columbus as it flees the Canadian winter and fetching up for a few days at the zoo.

Oh, I needed that. Thank you. I love flamingos and gorillas and elephants, but you're something else again. It's so good to see you here. What a silly perch for a pretty bird.