Zookeeper
A most unusual career path full of a few zigs and zags! As a high school student in an American city with only squirrels to play with, she became interested in biology and animals but didn’t know that working in a traveling circus would lead to starting a zoo far from home.
SM was born in Baltimore. Her father was a sales manager for a beer company; her mother was an administrative assistant.
As a girl, she indulged her love of animals by playing with squirrels – one of the few examples of wildlife she could find in the city. During high school, her major interest was in biology, where she tended worms and liberated live frogs from her school’s biology lab because she could not bear to see them dissected.
Unsure of a career path when graduating from high school, she joined the Air Force. Following her military service, she studied Russian at the University of Iowa before transferring to the New College of Florida in Sarasota, where she received a bachelor’s degree in biology.
CAREER RISK #1 – SM’s eventual career path started in a very unusual situation with no thought of where it might lead. Her college town, Sarasota, Florida, happens to be the location of the Circus Hall of Fame. While in a restaurant reading a book about animal behavior, a Romanian lion tamer approached her and asked her to become his assistant at the Circus Hall of Fame. She said she would give it a try.
CAREER RISK #2 – Several years later, as a graduate student concentrating in mycology (the study of fungi), SM answered an ad posted by a traveling Mexican circus seeking exotic dancers. The ad promised “good pay, much travel.” The job involved only night work so she thought she could do field work during the day in pursuit of her interest in biology and be a dancer at night.
BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP RECOMMENDATION – By coincidence, the circus leader’s wife remembered SM from her association with the Romanian lion tamer and recommended her for the show’s lion taming act.
SM said, “I don’t agree with animal acts, in principle but I justified it that it was better me than someone else who might not share her respect for the animal kingdom. “
CAREER RISK #3 – By coincidence, SM met a British filmmaker, who invited her to travel with him to Belize, a small island in the Caribbean Sea within the Central America region. When funding for the movie ran out, she found herself alone with about two dozen animals, among them two jaguars, a small wildcat known as a margay, several piglike peccaries, a few parrots and the long-nosed rapier which is Belize’s national animal. Many of the animals were injured or otherwise unfit for life in the wild, leaving SM, as she saw her options, with little choice in how to proceed. “There was zero planning on my part. But I was at a crossroads; I either had to shoot the animals or take care of them because they couldn’t take care of themselves.”
CAREER RISK #4 – Faced with shooting or caring for the animals or just leaving them to fend for themselves in the wild, with no established zoo to take over care for the animals, SM decided to open the first zoo in Belize. At first, she raised and sold chickens and worked as a nature guide to support the animals and herself. She wooed the zoo’s first paying visitors with the help of the staff at a nearby restaurant who sent their customers her way.
SM decided it was her mission to share the animals with the people who lived in Belize and in many cases, had never seen wildlife up close. Schoolchildren began making field trips to the zoo. To provide the same opportunity for others who were unable to visit the zoo, SM traveled around the country on her motorcycle with a boa constrictor! And she wrote children’s books about a character named Hoodwink the Owl.
Over the years, SM increasingly earned the trust and admiration of Belizeans as well as the ire of some business leaders whose development projects she opposed to safeguard the Belizean rain forest. One government official compared SM to the Harpy Eagle, which happened to be her favorite animal: “Once she gets her talons into you, she does not let go.”
SM also attracted favorable attention from environmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International and the Mac-Arthur Foundation, which contributed funding for what eventually became a sanctuary for nearly 190 animals representing more than 45 species native to Belize, among them the tapir and jaguar, the spider monkey, the coatimundi, the scarlet macaw, the jabiru stork and two species of crocodile.
SM lived a humble life as the Belize zookeeper; she became a citizen of Belize, lived on the zoo’s property, and laundered her clothes in a crocodile pond. The zoo helped awaken national pride in Belize’s ecological treasures and has been celebrated around the world as a model of creative conservation.
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This career story is based on a NY Times obituary. The Editor apologizes for failing to note and record the obit author’s name and date it was published. This career story was prepared early in the project, when the editor wanted no obvious distinction between stories prepared from personal interviews and obituaries but since then, readers will note many stories use actual names of the individuals behind the career stories when the story is based on an obituary, which has already made that individual’s name public. Where the career story is based on an editor’s personal interview of the storyteller who wishes to remain anonymous, neither the name nor her / his actual initials are used, as privacy will be forever maintained as promised by the editor, which practice encourages full disclosures without potential embarrassment to the storyteller.
