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For wildlife, for all at Lincoln Park Zoo

Following the opening of the new Pepper Family Wildlife Center, we find out more about the zoo’s conservation mission & goals

Megan Ross Lincoln Park Zoo

Dr Megan R. Ross is the president and CEO of Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. She joined the zoo from Zoo Atlanta in 2000 and during her 20-year tenure, she has served as curator of birds, general curator, vice president of animal care, and executive vice president. She became zoo director in 2018 and took on her current role at the start of 2022.

A published scientist and committed environmentalist, her population management work has earned grants from the Association of Zoos & Aquariums (AZA) Conservation Endowment Fund. Her work developing behavioural monitoring tools and systems—including ZooMonitor, an app now used regularly by more than 300 zoos worldwide—has been funded by the Rice Foundation and Institute of Museum & Library Services.

Studying animal behaviour

She tells blooloop:

“I have liked animals since I was very young. My family had dogs and cats, then, eventually, rabbits and hamsters and things like that. I  always liked being outside in nature. But I didn’t actually know that studying animal behaviour was something you could aspire to do until I was in college.”

A professor in college gave a lecture during a lunch period:

“I went to go see it, and she was talking about animal behaviour. I remember sitting there watching her talk about studying primates in Indonesia. And I thought, ‘Wait a minute, you can make this a job? Wow. The thing that I like to do in my free time is an actual career.’”

Newborn-Zebra Lincoln Park Zoo

“That’s when I really started to be interested in animal behaviour. I was already a biology major and had been inclined in math and sciences before I went to college. So I knew I wanted at least to explore those fields. But when I found out animal behaviour was a possibility, I realised that psychology was a part of that as well.”

Accordingly, she did a double major in biology and psychology for her undergraduate degree.

“I took some amazing ornithology classes and did some behavioural studies with birds in undergrad. I also worked in a lab where we were looking at psychology in small rodents. Then I graduated, and had no idea how to get a job in animal behaviour.”

Dr Megan Ross & Lincoln Park Zoo

She worked for a software company for a brief period of time:

“It was not affiliated with animal behaviour at all. Then I met the director of the zoo in Atlanta, through a mutual friend. He talked to me about zoos. I didn’t even understand that zoos are such conservation organisations until that point.”

She applied to become his graduate student, then worked at Zoo Atlanta as a research assistant, gaining her master’s and PhD along the way.

Lincoln-Park-Zoo-Visitor-Center

“I had a lot of amazing opportunities,” she says. “I lived in China for a period of time and studied giant Pandas, and I helped co-teach a field course in Kenya and South Africa looking at ungulate behaviour for undergraduate students.”

Then Lincoln Park Zoo called, and asked her to apply for the position of curator of birds:

“I applied, and they offered it to me. I’ve been here for 22 years, in a variety of roles. I started as a curator of birds, then worked in all the different areas of the zoo in different capacities over my tenure. I think I’ve had 10 different positions at the zoo at this point.”

Wildlife for all

She is the first woman to run Lincoln Park Zoo and only the eighth head of the institution in its 153 years. She says:

“One of the amazing things about Lincoln Park Zoo is that when they get here, people tend to stay for a long period of time. I think that speaks a lot to the culture of the institution, and how people feel like it’s a part of where they want to be.”

Lincoln Park Zoo is the only free, privately managed institution in the US.

Nature Boardwalk Chicago

“The zoo’s mission is to connect people with nature,” says Ross. “Our tagline is ‘For wildlife. For all’, which encompasses who we are and what we stand for. We have one of the largest science departments of any zoo in the country and are one of the top 10 science organisations. We have about 40 scientists on staff doing different research studies.

“Our vision is concerned with where we’re going, and how we can, in this urbanizing world, really connect communities with the nature around them, making sure that not just animals and nature thrive, but that the people thrive as well.

“We are really interested in figuring out how to make sure that communities of the future can thrive and flourish.”

Connecting people with wildlife at Lincoln Park Zoo

In terms of education, this can mean connecting people emotionally with the wildlife and then broadening it out into conservation initiatives.

“A lot of those things go hand in hand,” she explains. “You don’t want to put a lot of effort into something that you don’t care about. So, the first thing you need to do is to care about something, and then you build from there. We’re very interested in having people connect with animals at the zoo. But we are also interested in people connecting with nature just in their own backyard.”

Lincoln-Park-Zoo-Macaque-family

She gives an example:

“We have the Urban Wildlife Institute, which is the largest urban database on animals and urban settings in the world. We are the lead for that group. There are now 36 cities involved. Most of these are in North America, though we do have a city that just joined from Germany.

“We are all collecting data the same way so that we can understand how animals are navigating urban landscapes, so we can begin to make sure that animals, as well as people, are thriving in those same landscapes.

“We are interested in how you create the cities of the future based on this data, and in figuring out, in terms of these places where nature and humans are intersecting, how you make an approach that benefits both.”

Understanding animal welfare

As an animal behaviour researcher, Ross’s area of focus has been around understanding animal welfare:

“Animal care is what we can provide to animals, and animal welfare is about how they experience the world, how they feel about the world around them,” she explains:

“It’s about their own perspective on the world. One of the things that we try to understand is how we can ask animals what they like, what they prefer. One of the tools that we use to do that is to collect behavioural data about them.”

“For as long as I’ve been at Lincoln Park Zoo, we have been collecting behavioural data on our animals. It was getting a little bit cumbersome because you would collect it on a piece of paper with a pencil. Or maybe you might try to write it into an Excel spreadsheet. It became obvious that this was going to be a hindrance for figuring out how you could quickly understand what the animals are doing, and how they’re spending their time.”

Accordingly, Ross and her team worked to develop the ZooMonitor app. This is a behavioural monitoring tool now used regularly by more than 300 zoos worldwide.

ZooMonitor

Baby flamingo Lincoln Park Zoo

She says:

“ZooMonitor allows us to collect information on where the animal is, at that moment and how they’re spending their time.

“Then the curators or the other animal care staff can look at which areas they prefer, how their behaviour seems, whether there are changes in their behaviours that could be affected by all sorts of things: time of day, temperatures, management decisions, challenges with conspecifics.

“When you have all this information, you can start to make changes, and see if it affects the animal’s behaviour and where they’re spending their time.”

For example:

“We were looking at our pygmy hippos and we realised that one of them wasn’t as active as the other pygmy hippo. We didn’t know if that was because she was newer to the institution, or what the reasons were. But we observed through the monitor that she was spending time in one space.

“We realised that the care staff were feeding her in the space where she seemed to spend her time. So, in order to facilitate what pygmy hippos would normally be doing, which is looking around and foraging for food, we started putting in feeders in different places that would drop food randomly.”

The result was that the pygmy hippo, started to explore her habitat, becoming – along with her companion – more active and curious.

The Pepper Family Wildlife Center

“We also used ZooMonitor for  things like renovating a new building,” Ross says:

“We just opened the Pepper Family Wildlife Center, which is a brand new, state-of-the-art lion habitat. The design was informed by the behaviour of the lions we had previously had here.

“We know, for example, that lions like to spend 50% of their time in the shade. Therefore, 50% of the habitat is under a shade structure. We know that lions like to be on elevated platforms. So, we gave them an area of platforms in their space based on the percentage of time they like to spend on elevated platforms.”

Pepper Family Wildlife Center

“When we looked at heat maps, we used to see hotspots, which were the areas the lions preferred. Now, when we look at heat maps of where they’re spending their time in their habitat, we see that their time is evenly distributed across the habitat.

“So those are the two ways that we’re using ZooMonitor: for day to day management, but also, to inform how we create brand new habitats.”

Lincoln Park Zoo & COST of Wisconsin

Lincoln Park Zoo worked with COST of Wisconsin, an industry leader in theme and speciality construction on the Pepper Wildlife Center:

For this project, COST of Wisconsin was responsible for simulated rockwork within the exhibit space, including some heating/cooling rocks for the cats. The company created Kopje-style rockwork to allow the cats to perch and view the exhibit grounds from above, as well as working on some rock cladding on the guest view side.

Pepper Family Wildlife Center

“They brought some artists here to make sure that we were replicating the rock work appropriately,” says Ross. “We have staff that work exclusively in Tanzania, who were sending us pictures of different types of rocks that the lions like in Tanzania. COST’s artists would replicate how those rocks looked.

“It was amazing to watch them work. Some of the rocks had a little bit of an iron look to them, so the oranges would pop out. Some of them were sandstone. They’re a really talented group. When you’re trying to connect people to nature, it’s important for them to feel like they’re in nature.”

It might be important to the lions, too.

Conservation at Lincoln Park Zoo

Moving on to talk about conservation initiatives, she says:

“We have two main field areas where we’re studying animals in the wild. One of them is Tanzania. We have multiple sites there where we’re working with the KopeLion project, looking at lion conservation.”

Lion at Lincoln Park Zoo

KopeLion, is comprised of local experts and international scientists. It strives to foster human-lion coexistence, employing former lion hunters to actively protect the remaining lions and reduce conflicts. Work builds upon data collected over the last 50 years, representing the best-known, best-studied lions in the world.

Having positive conversations

In addition:

“Lincoln Park Zoo is working on an elephant project in Serengeti and a mammal survey across Tanzania that we’ve been working on for a while.

“We also have another field site where we have staff that are working all the time in the Republic of Congo. It’s in the Goualougo Triangle, which National Geographic called ‘the last Eden’ in the nineties.

“It’s extraordinarily remote, but just extraordinarily dense with biodiversity. We have had staff working there for more than 20 years. The forest space is being harvested for logging, and they have been focused on figuring out how logging can coexist with spaces where there are great apes.”

“Our staff member, Dave Morgan, actually wrote some of the guidelines for FSC [Forest Stewardship Council], on how to harvest appropriately around great apes.

“It’s one of the only programs that I’m aware of where the loggers will contact the scientists that are working in the area and say, we need to do different trans lines, which ones are going have the least impact on the chimps and gorillas? And because we’ve been there for so long in studying these chimps and gorillas, we can answer those questions.

“It’s an amazing effort, due, in large part, to the great personality and amazing dedicated team that’s working there. They are having those very positive conversations, so it doesn’t ever become a confrontation.”

Wildlife trafficking

A further conservation initiative that Lincoln Park Zoo is working on concerns wildlife trafficking:

“We have a staff member who is working on Asian songbirds and looking at wildlife trafficking. We are putting effort into understanding some of the drivers for illegal wildlife trafficking, and how can we mitigate those drivers. This will help us to protect those populations from being decimated by illegal wildlife trafficking.”

We are putting effort into understanding some of the drivers for illegal wildlife trafficking, and how can we mitigate those drivers.

“So those, in addition to the Urban Wildlife Institute and our community efforts around the coexistence of humans and wildlife in urban landscapes, are the main conservation programmes.”

Reintroducing animals

Lincoln Park Zoo also has a number of scientists working on animal releases and reintroductions. She explains:

“They are doing mathematical modelling, and spend a lot of time looking at populations and how we can genetically create the populations of the future so that we have enough animals of different populations for different species to be released, and at how we can ensure we’re not over-releasing a certain gene group.”

eastern black rhino rhinoceros Lincoln Park Zoo

“It’s important to make sure that we have a nice demography so that we have the next recruitment for the next generation of Puerto Rican parrots, or whatever species it is. We have a team of scientists that focus on that. They’re really mathematical modelling conservation biologists, rather than field biologists, I would say.

“We have people that have expertise in very specific portions of the science. It’s a matter of bringing all those scientists together to make sure that we have the whole landscape of what needs to happen.”

Lincoln Park Zoo & COVID-19

40% of Lincoln Park Zoo’s revenue is earned, from food and beverage, retail, parking, events; a further 40% is raised revenue, from membership, donations and grants:

“15% of our budget is a subsidy provided by the city. This was established when we privatized in 1995,” says Ross. “It has remained the same dollar amount since 1995. A further 5% of our budget is an endowment that we have established over time.”

baby_gorilla-lincoln park zoo

“With COVID, obviously, the earned revenue side was non-existent for a period of time. And then it was very slow to come back, so that was one of our biggest challenges.

“I will say that there were a lot of opportunities for some relief that we were able to apply for. That helped us get through last year, and is helping with getting through this year. So, we were very fortunate, but yes: COVID has been challenging.”

Rising to the challenge

However:

“There is nothing like a challenge to bring out the amazing nature of your team,” she adds. “Our team is truly one of the best. Everyone really rallied together and made sure that we were not letting anything slip, made sure that we were still pre providing the best care, made sure that our gardens were still beautiful.”

There is nothing like a challenge to bring out the amazing nature of your team. Our team is truly one of the best.

“I will also say that we’ve been extraordinarily fortunate in that none of our animals have gotten COVID. We have been singularly focused on trying to make sure our PPE is appropriate for our staff so that we can protect the animals.”

A new strategic plan

In terms of developments, Lincoln Park Zoo has just wrapped up its nine-year,  $135 Pride of Chicago capital campaign. Ross says:

“As a part of that campaign, we have a brand new renovated Japanese macaque exhibit. There is also an African penguin exhibit, and a new polar bear habitat. We have a new learning centre for some of our learning programmes, a new visitor centre, and, of course, the Pepper Family Wildlife Center for the lions.”

Pepper Family Wildlife_Center

“We are now in the process of moving forward into our next phase. So, we are looking at what needs attention on the campus, small projects, big projects, and then trying to prioritise them. This next year is really going to be about evaluating our facilities and figuring out what can be better. We’re going to be putting together a new strategic plan for a lot of our programmes.

“We have 40 scientists, but we also have a very robust programme centring on community work here in Chicagoland where we co-create programmes with community members here in the city. We are looking to expand those.”

Lincoln Park Zoo’s vision: the four Cs

The zoo is also looking at its sustainability efforts:

“We have been intentionally moving forward to become more sustainable. Our electricity, for example, is all sourced from green sources and has been for a few years. But we want to go a little bit deeper and have a more intentional sustainability plan.”

Outlining the vision for the future, she adds:

“What we are really focused on is what I like to call the four Cs.”

Care is the first:

“How can we improve care? In terms of our welfare programme, we have ZooMonitor, and we have some other tools that we’ve developed. But how can we take that to the next level of understanding animals?

“How can we ask them questions about how they want to be cared for? How do you design a habitat where you can ask an animal, ‘Do you wanna spend time with this animal or that animal; do you enjoy spending time in this space or that space?’ We want to let them be a part of the conversation. That’s something we’re excited about.”

Accessiblity & inclusivity

Next is conservation:

“We’re excited about expanding our conservation efforts. I’ve talked about this.”

The third C is community:

“I’ve also covered our community efforts, and how we are being good community partners through urban wildlife, or community partners where we are connecting people in their own community with the nature that’s around them.”

Last is culture:

“We are really interested in how we look at the culture of work at Lincoln Park Zoo. We are for wildlife for all.

“When you’re for wildlife for all, you have to start by looking at yourself and making sure you are intentionally for all. We spend a lot of time talking about accessibility for all different guests and visitors and staff members, and how, hopefully, they can see themselves reflected in Lincoln Park Zoo.

“If we want to be for wildlife for all, we had better make sure we know that we look and feel as if we are for all.”

All images kind courtesy of Lincoln Park Zoo

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Lalla Merlin

Lalla Merlin

Lead features writer Lalla studied English at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University, and Law with the Open University. A writer, film-maker, and aspiring lawyer, she lives in rural Devon with an assortment of badly behaved animals, including a friendly wolf

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