ANIMALS: By the Lake

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Of the big zoos, each has its points of superiority. The Bronx's is the biggest anywhere. Little, open-air tractor trains, salvaged from the 1939 World's Fair, help visitors get around its spacious preserve. The Bronx has the greatest variety of species, and some of the greatest oddities. Its bongo, a reddish antelope with white rings around its middle, is the only one in captivity. Its okapi, built like a giraffe in front and a zebra behind, is the only one in the U.S. This spring the Bronx made a big splash with the importation of three duck-billed platypuses, the first to be brought to the U.S. from Australia since 1922.

Philadelphia's zoo, founded in 1859, claims to be the oldest in the land. Chicago's Brookfield, opened in 1934, is the newest of the big zoos; it emphasizes quantity—49 kangaroos, an antelope collection of 29 species. St. Louis, where Perkins was trained, has the most showmanlike zoo, with elaborate daily performances by trained chimps, elephants and lions.

At the Cincinnati Zoo, over the din of squawking birds and roaring cats, grand opera is performed nightly in midsummer. Washington's National Zoo is notable for the contributions it gets from the White House—Teddy Roosevelt gave it a Somali ostrich, Calvin Coolidge a pigmy hippo, Franklin Roosevelt an Archangel pigeon.

The San Diego Zoo permits vulture-headed guineas, crested screamers and wild turkeys to roam free over its 200-odd acres. Here, California hair seals are trained for circuses and other zoos.

Bushman. Marlin Perkins' collection at Lincoln Park is good, if not dazzling. Among its 2,800 specimens are several star performers. One of them is Heinie, a male chimp who does a terrifying stomp to get an audience's notice and then spits ponderously at the nearest face. Other headliners are Dillinger, an 18-year-old lion whose savagery has never been tempered, and Judy, a 39-year-old elephant, who loves cough drops.

Lincoln Park's star of stars is a gorilla named Bushman. Recently, the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums proclaimed Bushman "the most outstanding and most valuable single animal of its kind in any zoo in the world." Worth about $100,000, Bushman is a magnificent, 520-lb. anthropoid, 6 ft. 2 in. tall, with an arm spread of nearly twelve feet. At 19, he is in his black prime.

Born in the bush of French West Africa, Bushman was captured in babyhood. He got to Lincoln Park in 1930, weighing 38 Ibs. Almost every morning for 4½ years, Keeper Eddie Robinson hitched Bushman to a 75-ft. rope and took him out for a romp on the monkey-house lawn. Man and beast wrestled, ran races, played football. Bushman learned how to heave a neat underhand pass, run with the ball, dodge tacklers. He was always gentle and obedient.