Living: The New Zoo: A Modern Ark

Call it a natural disaster. The San Diego Zoo spent $3.5 million to build a designer forest that would house five adolescent Malayan sun bears. The zookeepers planted some trees, dug a moat, launched a waterfall, even hooked up a fiber-glass tree with an electric honey dispenser. As company for their wards, they invited lion-tailed macaques, yellow-breasted laughing thrushes, orange-bellied fruit doves and Indian pigmy geese.

When the lush exhibit opened this summer, zoogoers loved it. So did the bears. They shredded the trees, rolled up the sod, plugged the moat -- and then one attempted a fast break over the wall. Spectators went scrambling for a zookeeper, who propped up a plywood barrier while another clanged some pots and pans to intimidate the beasts and herd them into a locked enclosure.

Meanwhile, at Washington's National Zoo another experiment was under way: scientists wanted to acquaint their rare golden lion tamarins with a facsimile of their natural habitat, a lowland Brazilian forest. But the coddled, zoo- happy monkeys lacked some basic skills -- how, for instance, to peel a banana. Instead, they fell out of the trees and got lost in the woods.

At some 150 American zoos in between, the troubles are not very different. The sharks eat the angelfish. The Australian hairy-nosed wombat stays in its cave, and the South American smoky jungle frog hunkers down beneath a leaf, all tantalizingly hidden from the prying eyes of the roughly 110 million Americans who go to zoos every year. Visitors often complain that as a result of all the elaborate landscaping, they cannot find the animals. But this, like almost everything else that goes wrong these days, is a signal that America's zoos are doing something very right.

Just about every aspect of America's zoos has dramatically changed -- and improved -- from what viewers saw a generation ago. Gone are the sour cages full of frantic cats and the concrete tubs of thawing penguins. Instead the terrain is uncannily authentic, and animals are free to behave like, well, animals, not inmates. Here is a Himalayan highland full of red pandas, there a subtropical jungle where it rains indoors, eleven times a day. The effect is of an entire globe miraculously concentrated, the wild kingdom contained in downtown Chicago or the North Bronx. As American zoos are renovated and redesigned -- at a cost of more than a billion dollars since 1980 -- hosts of once jaded visitors, some even without children, are flooding through the gates. "In the past 15 years," says Cincinnati zoo director Edward Maruska, "we've probably changed more than we've changed in the past hundred."

And all to what end? To entertain, of course, but to do more than that. By junking the cages and building vast biological gardens, the zoos provide a decent, delightful place for animals and people to meet and, with luck, fall in love. Once that bond is made, the visitors discover there is a larger mission at hand, a crusade to join. Between the birth of Christ and the Pilgrims' landing, perhaps several species a year became extinct. By the 1990s the extinction rate may reach several species an hour, around the clock. American zoos are leading the battle to stop that clock and recruit others to the preservationist's cause. "We don't just want you to come here," says David Anderson of the New Orleans Audubon Park. "We're trying to say, 'Do something!' "