Beasts of Burden

March 8, 2008

Nelson's Natureland is once again faced with closure, maybe this time for real. So is it a case of a heartless city council being too ready to kill off a perennial struggler, or simply natural selection at work? Geoff Collett reports. -------------------- The evidence - the anecdotal variety at least - suggests that unless you're a small child, or the parent of a small child, you probably haven't been to Natureland for a while, so some scene- setting may be in order.
One of the first things you'll see after paying your five bucks at the gate ($3.50 for children, under-two-year-olds free) is a corella called Missy. Missy can talk, as cockatoos do - she croaks a greeting to a passing Natureland staff member on this occasion, and the staff member cheerily returns it - but she is more remarkable for the ugly gash where her lower beak used to be. A former mate ripped it off, according to the information sign on Missy's cage. Nature can be brutal.
Wander a few steps along the path and come to the paddocks that house poultry and some horned sheep. Then more poultry. Some goats and poultry. More poultry, more sheep. To the left lies an open play area, deserted for now save for some vintage play equipment quietly fading under the beating sun.
Next comes the otter enclosure, a prime attraction, cheerfully painted up to disguise its inherently drab, utilitarian design. Across there are kea, housed in one of the various concrete and wire-mesh cages. This one has been titivated to resemble a high-country scene. Big efforts have been made over the years to improve the space for the mountain parrots which, as many people opine these days, really don't belong in a zoo. But for better or worse, they're here and have made do with their confined existence - one of their number hails from the day Natureland opened in November 1966 and still whiles away its days in its cage. The bird is now thought to be more than 50 years old.
On this visit, kea are mostly evading public view. Not that there's much in the way of public to view anything - it's mid-afternoon and mid-week, so not exactly peak time. Visible visitors, parents and small children combined, can be counted on your fingers.
The capuchin monkeys are another must- see. The walk-through aviary, filled with budgies, pigeons, parakeets and similar small birds, is a peaceful, restful environment and leads on to more caged birds including a magpie called Cleo who whistles with a panache that might surprise those who have long since written off magpies as vicious, nasty, good-for-nothing brutes.
The wander continues. So does the poultry. There are some ducks and a shag. Guinea pigs and rabbits in hutches over there. An ancient concrete, tin and mesh block - another of the original features of the park - houses various mildly-exotic birds, parrots and the like. Finally, there's the aquarium and the tuatara enclosure. Like kea, the weird reptiles are taking a break from public scrutiny for the minute.
A tour of Natureland would be incomplete, however, without mentioning the star of the piece: Ricky, the "special needs" capuchin monkey, left badly brain-damaged after being brutalised by a jealous sibling straight after birth almost 15 years ago. Ricky is a legend in these parts and beyond: as if his near- fratricide experience wasn't enough, he went on to contract flu, only being saved when the staff couldn't bear watching him die, and public hospital medical and nursing staff helped carry him through.
Ricky's lot may seem pathetic - he suffers mild epilepsy, is too hapless to fend for himself so lives alone. Nature can be heartless.
But he is a huge hit. His birthday parties are always the biggest event on the park's calendar. He has single-handedly restored the reputation of Natureland simians, after the unfortunate experience in the 1980s with Pan the chimpanzee, an unlovely beast whose greatest claim to fame was, as legend has it, breaking out and killing a goat while on the run.
As the park's curator and frontwoman, Gail Sutton, reflects, if Ricky's brain-damage had been known about at the time of his flu, he would surely have been left to die; but as it is, his placid and tragic nature has made him an unlikely hero of the place, able to be handled by visitors - "he's a bit of a Nelson icon" as she puts it.
The phones have been running hot at Natureland since last weekend, when news broke that its financial lifeline is about to be snipped by the Nelson City Council, dooming the zoo to likely closure. Most of those calls, Sutton says, have been from people anxious to know what will become of Ricky.
It's tempting to dabble with some symbolism here: something around how just as Ricky, the battered, unlucky one, has risen above his handicaps to become a much-loved fixture of Natureland, so has Natureland itself consistently defied its own hokey-ness, shortcomings and disadvantages to secure a place close to Nelson's collective bosom.
An unsentimental visitor might regard it without much favour. Even Sutton - surely its prime advocate and chief flag-waver, with 18 years' service behind her and very much the human face of the place - readily, and frequently, acknowledges that it is tired, struggling. The public at large apparently concur. They stay away in droves. A very big day at Natureland - say, Ricky's birthday party or last Sunday, when the punters flocked in a gesture of solidarity - will see maybe 400 through the turnstile. Mid-week, you're looking at maybe one-tenth of that. Annually, fewer than 35,000. It is most popular with small children and their parents - frequently, it is cited as a useful choice to fill in some time with bored youngsters.
From Natureland's point of view, that's not enough to pay the bills, never mind do any of the new things the park's guardians have so long yearned for. Natureland has been in a death-spiral for years: living hand-to-mouth, never having enough money to jolly things up and so tempt more visitors to spend more money. Now, it seems, the inevitable conclusion to the death-spiral has arrived.
If Nelson city councillor Ali Boswijk - a member of the "Hands Up" group who swept to office at Civic House last October - is feeling torn over having to front for a council that has just decided the time has come to put Natureland to sleep, she shows no sign. While signatures on petitions and letters to the Nelson Mail flood in; while Natureland's grassroots supporters march on the council; while it would be easy to imagine a council under siege and hastily trying to figure out a face-saving climbdown, Boswijk is unconvinced.
She has been paying close attention to the wailings and gnashings, even initiating contact with some of the more scandalised individuals to talk further.
Surprisingly enough, she says, when pressed it turns out such people don't necessarily agree with Natureland as it is now. It is more the sort of thing it "could be" that they don't want to miss out on - a place somewhere in the city, whether on the Tahunanui beachfront reserve or elsewhere, where families can go for children to have hands-on interaction with animals.
Boswijk has a long association with the park. She's a parent, for one thing, so used to take the kids along. More formally, on one of the previous occasions when its finances were so parlous that the council was prepared to pull the plug, back in 1999 - with the crisis avoided when a community trust agreed to take over - Boswijk was asked to join the trust board for her marketing and communications skills.
Such sympathies notwithstanding, she admits to misgivings about the place - namely, its collection of exotic animals, kea, capuchins and the like. "I do struggle with that side of things." Other councillors do too, apparently - the point was one of those debated as they grappled with the Natureland question. The council is more enthusiastic about ventures like the Brook Sanctuary, the project to create a fenced, predator-free nature sanctuary over hundreds of hectares in the Upper Brook Valley, akin to the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in Wellington, where critters can thrive in their own environment. The approach, it has to be said, is certainly more fashionable than zookeeping.
As should be clear by now, Natureland has always muddled along - this is the third time, although certainly the most dramatic, where the "closure" word has been aired. So what's changed, that Natureland can't be tossed yet another lifeline? Why, indeed, won't the council give the zoo the chance it's never had and spend some serious money on it?
Boswijk responds with talk about "core business", about the need for certainty, about the council wanting to deal with a crisis efficiently. But in short, it seems the poultry has come home to roost for Natureland this time - that it's compounding losses have got to the point where hundreds of thousands would be needed simply to steady the thing. No costings have been done on what might be spent to launch it into a new generation, but Boswijk hazards a guess that it would have to be in the millions.
Then there would be the on- going costs - the marketing, the promotions, compliance.
It is also worth noting that the zoo is a member of the Australasian network of zoos, the Australasian Regional Association of Zoological Parks and Aquaria, or Arazpa. The group gives its members support and advice, among other things, but its New Zealand programme coordinator, Ian Fraser, points out that it is in the process of introducing a new accreditation process for Arazpa members which would raise the standards they have to operate to. The financial viability of an institution would be assessed as part of that, and while Natureland has not been so assessed - and no one is saying it would not meet a new standard - the plan simply underlines how the hurdles for modern zoos are not getting any lower.
As cruel as it probably is, Sutton's 18-year tenure at Natureland is at risk of ending with the epitaph, "If only...". She has a palpable weariness about her, from juggling the pressures of a manager staring down the barrel of seeing her business abandoned, of responding to the wave of public sympathy for Natureland's plight, of fretting over the fate of the hundreds of animals under her care, and of racking her and her staff's brains for some way out.
There's an almost-tragic air as she recounts the numerous ways Natureland has got by, usually by the seat of its pants, thanks to goodwill, ingenuity, making-do. It is easy to be unfair about the place, but it has always met the standards officialdom demands of zoos, fought hard for the interests of its collection, done its best to ensure the animals enjoy a decent life, contributed in its own small way to scientific research. It has, for example, no kakapo, but still manages to help kakapo research by allowing researchers to practise artificial- insemination techniques on its chooks. It has contributed to breeding programmes for giant weta and brown teal.
Sutton's enthusiasm has not yet been extinguished. If only, she reflects, someone like Jim Mora and his Mucking In television show decided to adopt Natureland as a project and a benefactor could come up with half-a-million dollars to pay for all that needs doing. If only the Tasman District Council could chip in half the $350,000 needed to steady things, Nelson City Council the other half.... Then, perhaps recognising the absurdity of that scenario, Sutton looks slightly rueful. "We've been out there, clutching at every straw we can, " she admits.
But while being reliant on the council may be Natureland's current bane, it probably also provides any remaining hope the park has - councils being elected bodies, prone to public pressure. As the council has been at pains to point out to the save- Natureland group this week, if the park does - as the current decision holds - shut for the last time in three weeks' time, on March 31, it may not be the end of a zoo in the town.
The council has called for proposals from others who may have designs on the site and acknowledges that somebody could yet come up with a plan for a new, improved Natureland. It has bowed to public demands not to disperse the animal collection until it is clear what will come of the zoo - although the decision does not obviously remove the threat that eventually, the animals, or some of them, will end up unwanted.
So for now, what will become of a 50-year-old kea, a brain- damaged capuchin monkey, or a corella with half its beak missing remains the $64,000 question. Doubtless, such high-profile beasts will find a new, caring home, but the same cannot be said for all their fellow inhabitants.
Euthanasia has been openly talked about, albeit as a last resort, for those who are unwanted if, and when, Natureland is no more. More epitaphs may yet be called for.
It would be nice to think they read, "Somebody cared". But maybe something less sentimental is in order: perhaps, "Nature can be cruel". Nelson Mail