Volume 2, No. 21. November 8, 2002
A visionary
concept
Zoos have long mastered
the year-round calendar, showcasing nature in all the seasons of the year; man,
after all, can dress warm and imbibe in hot chocolate. But the 24-hour clock
has been another matter; man, like many species, has a pretty poor capacity
to see at night, which is why other species do their primary business of survival
at night. Some zoos offer sleep-overs with flashlight tours, and some night-roaming
reptiles and rodents can be seen by day via technological trickery of exhibitry.
Caribbean Gardens: the Zoo in Naples, Florida, has called on another form of
technology, personal night vision scopes, to make the whole zoo visible, and
therefore accessible, long after sunset. Thanks to the scopes from Night Owl
Optics, up to 15 people can take after dark tours to watch animals of all types
in their natural nighttime habitats and behaviors.
“One of the cool things is that there are a lot of nocturnal animals people
don’t see doing a lot of things in the day,” said Tim Tetzlaff, the
zoo’s director of education. Guests on the initial tours were “thrilled
with the porcupines,” Tetzlaff said, immobile piles of quills by day who
stamp their feet, dig at the earth and flex their quills by night. The tours
also point out how diurnal animals get safe sleep at night, like the monkeys
who bed down one per tree. “If you’re the only one in a tree of your
species and a branch starts moving, you know it’s not somebody getting
up to go to the bathroom,” Tetzlaff said.
Priced at $1,500 for up to 15 people—“It could be one person who has
$1,500 or 15 people for $100 each”—the tours start with a lesson in
using the night scopes. Then, Zoo Director David Tetzlaff leads the guests on
a cruise into the darkness while staff place browse (hidden food) to make the
nocturnal animals active. Part of the experience is using the night vision scopes.
“After we train people, we go pitch black and tell people where to look
and, bang, there’s a sloth,” Tim Tetzlaff said. One guest who had
been on real safaris in the wild, responded that he was “wowed.” “We
knew then we had a good thing going.”
The tours have yielded an unexpected surprise, too: it’s not just the zoo
that performs, but the indigenous wildlife of the area. “Several people
were watching the bats grabbing insects out over the lake,” Tim Tetzlaff
said. Staff get a kick out of the experience, too, not only from working at
the zoo in unusual circumstances but also “to see the excitement on the
guests’ part,” he said.
That excitement is the key point. With only four such tours a month planned
and each limited to 15 guests, the after dark tours is not so much a revenue
producer as it is a buzz builder. “It’s already generated fantastic
word-of-mouth around town,” said Tim Tetzlaff, who added that several groups
are inquiring about adding on shorter versions of the tour to their scheduled
events at the zoo. “It’s not just, ‘I went to the zoo today,’
no, no, no. It’s ‘I did a night tour at the zoo!’”
See?
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