ANIMALS: By the Lake

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This experience had no effect on Marlin Perkins' relations with snakes. He thought it quite natural to take four days out from his honeymoon to go snake-hunting in Arizona. He still thinks that rattlesnake and iguana meat are gourmets' delights.

In 1938 Perkins left St. Louis to take over the directorship of the Buffalo Zoo. There he found, an institution that was smelly, filthy and ratinfested. He cleaned it up. He doubled the animal population (a mere 400 specimens when he arrived). He designed and supervised the building of a new reptile house; its natural-habitat display cases, with fluorescent lighting, set a new standard for U.S. zoos. But he had difficulties; the Buffalo Zoo was mired in city politics. In 1944, he quit and went to Chicago.

In, three years at Lincoln Park, Perkins has already done an impressive job of brightening up and modernizing. To start with, he rewrote almost every label in the place so that visitors could get at least a faint bit of information about his animals. He set up a Zooanswer Shop, where people could have their curiosity about animals satisfied. (No. 1 question: "What is the gestation period of an elephant?" Answer: 19 to 21 months.) He repainted cages. He opened a Zoorookery (a cageless exhibit of scores of pinioned birds). And he enlarged the reptile exhibit.

In his day, Perkins has done many an odd chore. He has cleaned out elephant skulls and put them on exhibition, and removed the scent glands from skunks. In April, along with two Chicago newsmen, he hunted eels by flashlight in the open sewers of a southern Louisiana town. His wastebasket is the hollowed-out foot of an unmanageable elephant that was shot at the St. Louis Zoo.

Prohibitive Prices. Now that animals are being delivered to the U.S. from abroad in quantity, Perkins is anxious to enlarge his entire collection, which, like most others, lost some specimens during the war. But animal prices are sky-high (nearly double prewar), and Perkins has little money for purchases. Last week, when a boatload of animals came in from Singapore, he made a quick round of dealers in Manhattan and Camden, N.J. He especially wanted an orangutan: the $3,500 price tag was prohibitive. Instead he chose a pair of cheetahs ($1,800), a sacred ibis ($65), a patas monkey ($5).

Perkins is full of ideas to make zoogoing even more fun and more instructive. One small dream involves a sort of slot machine, called the "Chimpomat," which would demonstrate the learning capacity of chimps by automatically rewarding them for tricks well done. Another idea is for a great new reptile house for Lincoln Park. In it, he would like to have the best snake collection in the world. Then, he would like to use his old reptile house to present a complete natural history of animals. Says he: "Everything in the animal kingdom stems from water, and if you could show the relation between animals step by step, it would be wonderfully educational. Just think—you start out with microscopic life, go on with sea worms, and pretty soon you have the whole blooming animal kingdom there in front of you."