(upbeat cheerful music) - Welcome to "At Issue."

I'm H. Wayne Wilson, thank you for joining us.

This time, the half hour conversation will be about zoos and no, we're not going to visit zoos because they're interesting or they are fun for children, we're going to talk about a very serious issue and that is the extinction of certain species or the near extinction of certain species.

And we're going to have that conversation with Dawn Petefish.

Dawn is with the Peoria Zoo where she is the curator of collections.

Thank you for joining us on the program.

- Yeah, thank you for having me.

- And Erik Heinonen is here.

He is the keeper, (laughs) I like that title, the keeper- (Erik laughs) And you're at Miller Park Zoo in Bloomington.

- Yes.

- And just for clarification, Miller Park Zoo is part of the city of Bloomington?

- Correct.

- [Wilson] And Peoria Zoo is part of the Park District.

- Correct.

- And the first thing we wanna talk about is endangered, threatened, I mean, there's various levels.

We're familiar with, yeah, there's various levels of these endangered and threatened levels.

But Erik, is there a layman's definition of this structure so we know the difference?

- Sure, I think when we talk about endangered, there's kind of two levels, critically endangered and endangered, and both of those are talking about how close to extinction those species are.

So critically endangered means there's very few, they could go extinct at any point, just through any sort of accident or emergency.

A hurricane or something could knock out an entire population, and endangered means that there's very few of them left, that they're not in immediate danger of going extinct, but we do need to be very careful.

And then there's kind of like least concern and vulnerable, which means that they're in better shape, but everybody, we still need to be concerned about how many individuals are left in all of these populations.

- We're going to see video of animals, both at Miller Park and at Peoria Zoo and they are all endangered species.

- Correct.

- And why is it important that we have these kinds of programs?

If you could explain in, once again, in lay terms, how this works, why you have endangered species and what it is you do to try to maintain these animals.

- Yeah, so as Erik mentioned, if an animal is endangered, it's at risk of being extinct.

So basically, if we don't have a cooperative effort to save this species, it will go extinct.

And so if we don't have programs through the zoo or the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, or through the government, U.S.

Fish and Wildlife, or Illinois Department of Resources, we will lose these animals forever.

- So you don't operate independently.

Dawn mentioned the AZA, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, and the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife, and IDNR, could you give us an overview of how this coordination works in order to try to save these species?

- Yeah, very briefly, that all of the AZA zoos have all of their populations in a computer and anybody can look it up at any time, and then we coordinate, and if we're looking at a specific species, say giraffes or whatever, everybody can know exactly how many giraffes are at each individual AZA zoo at any time.

And then there's a coordinator for a program, a safe program, and they will decide which animals need to be moved to be bred or which animals need to be moved so they're not bred so that we maintain this genetic diversity that we will need if we ever reintroduce these animals to the wild.

- [Wilson] Erik mentioned the Safe Program- - Mmhmm.

- That's one of several programs that you have to try to save these species.

The Safe Program is saving animals from extinction.

- [Petefish] Correct, mmhmm.

- [Wilson] Can you give us a- - Yeah, so the amazing thing, this is a relatively new program for AZA.

We've had it for a few years now and it was AZA's answer to bringing in partners, whether it be universities or government agencies or biologists and really get their input on what is going on.

So if you have a species who is critically endangered and it's endangered because it's being poached, perhaps you need to talk to the law enforcement agency, and all of those things, whether it be breeding the species or taking care of the species, or reducing this wildlife trafficking, all of those people are in the same room at the same time, sharing the same information with the same goal.

So this collective expertise is just a wealth of knowledge and we can develop a plan based on that.

- And AZA is the organization that gives accreditation to- - Correct.

- Zoos, and not all zoos are accredited.

- Correct, it's a very rigorous process and they look at not only your animal care, but every aspect of the zoo, your guest services and your finances and your governance, and they wanna make sure that all of these accredited zoos are at the very top of the game and making sure that the animals in there are treated with the utmost concern to their welfare.

- We were fortunate enough to have an opportunity.

Todd Pilan, who's the director of this program, he and I went out to both zoos to get some video and we're going to show you some of the, and all these animals are endangered and we'll take a look at, first, the alligator snapping turtle.

And if you wanna go ahead and explain this to us, Dawn.

- [Petefish] Sure, so this is an aligator snapping turtle that is in our conservation center at the zoo.

That blue dot you saw on his shell is actually nail polish.

That's how we identify those aligator snapping turtles.

And this is obviously a rather large aligator snapping turtle, we call them ASTs for short, that we have behind the scenes.

This was, again, our cooperation with Illinois Department of Natural Resources and Florida Fish and Wildlife.

These animals were confiscated and so they were brought to us to care for them so that we could potentially release them.

- [Wilson] And you see that this particular one has its mouth open.

You don't wanna have your hand near that.

- No, you really don't, (laughs) you really don't.

- And we wanna say thank you to Doug Holmes who's the herpetologist who was the one holding up the snapping turtle.

I don't think I would be doing that.

Let's take a look at the next animal that, all again, on the endangered species list.

This one is the red wolf.

It's at the Miller Park Zoo.

Erik, if you wanna explain the red wolf to us, please.

- [Heinonen] Yeah, red wolves are a species of wolf that was historically found throughout the Southeastern United States.

Back in the mid to late 70s, they found out there are only about 14 pure bred wolves left in the whole country.

They're found only here in North America, only in the Southeast U.S., so they brought all of them in to captivity and started a breeding program to bolster their numbers.

And they did such a good job that back in the late 80s, they decided there were enough they could start releasing them into their natural habitat.

- [Wilson] Was this in North Carolina?

- Yes, the spot they chose was the Aligator River National Wildlife Refuge, just a little bit west of the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and they chose that spot because it was a fairly large wildlife refuge and there were no coyotes at the time.

Red wolves will inter-breed with coyotes if they feel they need to.

So without that influence there are- - [Wilson] So is there a way to measure the success of that reintroduction?

- Well, at one point, there were 120 wild wolves.

Some of those had been released and some of those had been bred in the wild, so it was on its way to being very successful.

Unfortunately, their numbers have dropped in recent years.

The state of North Carolina started to allow nighttime coyote hunting and so anybody who thought the wolves were a coyote or didn't want wolves on their property, and could claim they thought they were a coyote, could shoot them without any sort of penalty and then at the same time, the Fish and Wildlife stopped their reintroduction program, so the numbers have dropped.

Luckily, in the past few years, we've started reintroducing them again.

All of the adult wolves have bright orange collars so they're distinguishable from coyotes, and luckily, the past two years, we've had wild pups born.

So the program is back on its feet and it's gonna be doing better.

- Before we go to the next video, Dawn, Erik was talking about reintroducing animals to the wild.

- Yes.

- I wanna make it clear that all the animals we are seeing, you did not get these from the wild.

- No, the AST that we just saw was a confiscation, so this was just an opportunity for us to work with law enforcement and give this animal a home, but yes, most animals that we have at the zoo, if not all of them, were born in captivity, or in human care.

- And the purpose behind that is you don't wanna be taking animals from the wild, that's where they belong, if they were born there.

- Correct.

I mean, there are, like Dawn said, there are exceptions, but we don't wanna make the extinction problem worse.

We don't wanna be taking animals from the wild that are endangered or could be endangered at some point and cause them to go extinct.

- Let's go to the Peoria Zoo again and this time, we're going to look at giraffes, and I wanna point out, that the traditional way of looking at species of giraffes, there are eight species.

We're looking at a- - Reticulated giraffe.

- Reticulated?

- Mmhmm.

Yes, this happens to be Taji, this is our adult male.

So at Peoria Zoo, we have Reticulated giraffes and as we kinda touched on, with AZA, we have to manage these populations of animals depending on how much space we have in the zoo, and in all of AZA zoos, and so, Reticulated giraffes are the largest population.

There are, of course, Masai giraffes, and as we touched on a little bit earlier, they look completely different, come from different regions, and we manage them all as separate populations to keep their genetics as diverse as possible, but as closely related to their wild counterparts as possible.

- [Wilson] And of the eight, there are three that are endangered- - Mmhmm.

- The Masai, the Reticulated, and the Nubian.

- Correct.

- But real briefly, (chuckles) once again, here we go, technical terms, but can you explain, really we're starting to change our view of how many species of giraffes there are?

- Yeah, the latest studies, because they're doing a lot of work, genetic work, and research, and they've realized, probably, they can categorize them into four different species.

That's the latest from IUCN, which is the International Union for Conservation.

So they are looking at genetics constantly and grouping them in different ways.

- One of the issues that we have is that there's habitat loss, there's, in the case of turtles, cars driving over them on roadways, there's something called fragmentation.

What is fragmentation?

- Fragmentation is where the natural habitat, the natural range of an animal is chopped into smaller and smaller pieces through human development.

So if you think of like a huge forest that an animal would wanna live in, if you take part of that forest away, there may not be enough room to find food in that forest.

And so they have to go someplace else.

Or, if all the fragments keep shrinking, there's just no place to live anymore, there's not enough food, there's not enough cover, and so they come into contact with humans or they starve to death or something like that.

- And the expansion of the slash and burn techniques for agriculture, for palm oil in Indonesia, et cetera, there are any number of issues, many of them due to humans.

- Yes, yes, absolutely.

Those species who are very mobile species who need corridors to go from one wetland to another wetland, it's very difficult for them, as these habitats are fragmented, it's very difficult for them to move from place to place, safely.

Certainly you hear of turtles, especially breeding females, crossing the road, getting hit by cars, just trying to get from one wetland space or one habitat to another habitat, which is their nature to do.

- And there, of course, is illegal trade.

Snapping turtles, by the way, are ones that people actually have as pets, and I don't know why they would want to do that.

- [Petefish] Yeah.

- But you have an example of a bred panda, I believe this is.

- Yeah so- - [Wilson] This is the fur from a red panda- - So this is the fur from a red panda that would have died of natural causes in a zoo.

It's because it's part of an endangered species, it would be illegal for someone to own, but we have special permission from the government to have this and use it as an educational device.

But red pandas live in the Himalayas, Nepal and China and Tibet, in places like that, and habitat loss is definitely part of their issue, but also poaching.

You can see this is, they're from a nice, warm environment, so this fur is very thick, keep you nice and warm- - Nice cold environment.

- Yes.

- Mmhmm.

- And, it's also very beautiful, I mean, they're very beautiful animals and some people like to translate that into making them into fur coats or in this case, possibly hats.

So that's another reason that an animal would be endangered.

- And let's take a look at a couple of the red pandas- - Sure.

- At the Miller Park Zoo.

And we should point out that this is, again, an endangered species.

- [Heinonen] Correct.

Yeah, these are our two, China and Burma, and they were born in 2019 at our zoo.

They had a sibling who has since moved on to another zoo, like we've talked about, managed population, we sent one of the siblings on to go to another zoo and possibly be a breeder at some point.

- [Wilson] So, this is male and female?

- [Heinonen] It's a brother, sister pair, yes.

- [Wilson] Okay, so you would not breed these two?

- [Heinonen] No, these actually, we had to separate these two from February through May because that is the breeding season, and when you put animals in an unnatural situation, they have a drive to reproduce.

That's their goal in life is to reproduce, and so siblings, parents and offspring will breed with each other if they don't have another opportunity.

- [Wilson] They're very agile, they've got claws that, by the way, they actually were walking across the top of the cage and I don't mean on top, they were holding on underneath.

- [Heinonen] Yeah, yeah they will hook their claws and hang on top and walk Spider-Man style, upside down, across the top of the roof of the cage.

They're very agile climbers.

They eat bamboo so they need to be up in the tops of the trees and the tops of the bamboo forest to get their food.

- [Wilson] And I noticed that there's a mist that is spraying on, you might be able to see a little bit of the mist there- - [Heinonen] Yeah, it's coming across.

- [Wilson] And why is that?

- [Heinonen] Again, these are cold weather animals, they live up in the, you know, the Himalayas where it's always cold, it never gets into the 80s and so (mutters) there at the zoo the other day, it was fairly warm, so we put a mister on them to keep them cool.

- So before we go to the next video, we're gonna show lemurs and I want to explain that lemurs, there's maybe close to 100 species of lemurs.

- Correct, mmhmm.

- But they're all on the island of Madagascar?

- That's true and they are all endangered, and all lemurs have been endangered since 1970.

- All species?

- All species of lemurs.

- And the island is off the east coast of Africa, it's the fourth largest island, but still, there's 100 different species on this island.

- Yes, yes, amazing.

- And so, we're gonna show you lemurs at Peoria and then at Miller Park Zoo.

This is the ring-tailed lemur at Peoria Zoo.

And explain what was happening, that they were cleaning the normal- - [Petefish] These are our two females.

We have three lemurs in there, together, and it's one male and two females, and this is our holding space right now, and so my guess is the keeper was working in their main exhibit, and I happen to know that day, they got a brand new enrichment item, which is this big, like, sleeping shack that he was putting in the enclosure for them.

So this is, we actually do training behind the scenes and this is the space we do training behind the scenes.

So animals are weighed here and they do shift into this space as routine.

- And you can breed these, or are they related?

- This particular group is not slated to be bred and the reason we have the two females and the one male is for companionship.

And so it's really what's best for the lemur.

Lemurs need lemurs, and so, we have our two females are on contraceptives, which, as you said, when you put animals at the zoo in a setting, and you need them not to breed, we have several, several different ways that we contracept, sometimes males, sometimes females, it really just depends on the species.

- And that brings up the question of veterinarians.

You have veterinarians that work with all the different species.

Contraception wasn't one of the ideas that I thought about- (Dawn laughs) So that's true of Miller Park also.

- Yes, actually, we share the same veterinarian, we both use the University of Illinois wildlife veterinary Services.

They come out at least once a week and anytime we have an emergency, we can bring our animals to them.

So we don't just wait until they come up, but, and they're excellent.

They have so much knowledge and they end up being almost wholistic, I won't say life coaches, (laughs) but they do veterinary care, they help us with our nutrition.

If we have problems with housing or something like that, they'll help with that.

They're just a wealth of knowledge.

- Of the nearly 100 species of lemurs on Madagascar, red roughed lemurs are critically endangered now.

- [Heinonen] Potentially less than 1000 of them in the wild.

This is our family group.

So it's a mom and dad and an offspring from a couple years ago, and then another offspring from a few years later, and we did breed them, but we have been contracepting them the past few years.

So part of that managed population is sometimes we want babies, and sometimes we don't, so we have to prevent them from having more.

These four get along pretty good, but you start having too many in a group, it can be difficult.

- [Wilson] This is one of the largest lemurs of all of them.

- [Heinonen] Right, right.

And Madagascar is just a desperately poor country and so a lot of the folks who live there will do whatever they need to to survive.

So if that includes cutting down the forest to plant crops or cutting down the trees for wood to make houses or something like that, and so that makes the plight of all these lemurs just that much more difficult.

- Let's turn next to the Peoria Zoo and we're going to take a look at the spotted turtle.

Before we show that, I wanna mention that there are a lot of reasons why animals become enlisted on the endangered species list- - Yes.

- But in this particular case, it's automobiles- - Yes, yes, as we were talking, their habitat is severely fragmented, very small, small spaces for these turtles to exist, and certainly in Illinois, in Northern Illinois, and they travel from place to place.

They need clear, clean water and wetlands and when they're traveling, they get hit by cars.

Oh, love this guy.

As you can see, these guys are nicknamed the Polka Dot turtle.

They can live to be very, very old, over 100, and the older they get, the less spots they have.

So you can actually end up seeing an adult male with hardly any spots at all, or a spotless male, we should say.

(laughs) - [Wilson] And this is the only species in this particular genus.

- [Petefish] Correct.

- [Wilson] I think it's called the clemmys?

- Yes.

- The clemmys.

(Dawn laughs) I'm going back to my biology days in college.

There are the spots, so this isn't an older- - No.

- Spotted turtle.

- [Petefish] No, we bred these guys a couple years ago, and so this actually, I think, is probably one of the animals that had been born at our zoo.

- [Wilson] And they're native to Northeastern U.S.?

- Yes.

- Canada?

- [Petefish] Yeah, so there are some in Illinois.

There are pockets in Illinois and so they are an Illinois endangered species as well as being a federally listed endangered species.

- And these are just seven of the animals that we were able to get video of.

There are many other endangered species, including at Miller Park, the snow leopard.

- Yes, we have two snow leopards right now.

We used to be the, our former director used to be the head of the SSP, for the snow leopards, and we've had multiple litters there.

They're a cat from, again, like the Himalayas, and that region.

So, cold weather, they love to be outside all winter long.

If you come to the zoo in February, they're probably outside loving life at that point in time.

- And over at the Peoria zoo, spider monkeys are endangered.

- Yeah, and if you've been to Peoria Zoo, we've had the same resident spider monkeys there for, I've been at the zoo for 30 years, they were there before I was there.

Butch is our eldest, he's over 50.

So they've been there forever.

I think people actually recognize them.

We know they recognize the visitors.

- And golden frogs, you have golden frogs at both zoos, is that correct?

- Correct.

- Not currently, but we will have some more, yes.

- You'll have some more?

- Yes.

- [Wilson] And they are extinct in the wild, is that correct?

- Yes, absolutely.

- So it's critical now that the zoos serve a purpose in maintaining this particular species.

- Without zoos, the golden frogs would have gone extinct.

- [Petefish] Yes, absolutely.

- I mean, it's very clear that it was one or two zoos that went out and collected some before they could go extinct.

- And this is particularly important to introduce young people to animals in regard to the possibility of extinction?

- Yes, I think just connecting, connecting the kids with the animals and their plight is what's important.

- And with that, our half hour has expired.

We appreciate your conversation, Dawn Petefish, who is the curator of collections at the Peoria Zoo.

- That's correct.

- And the keeper- (everyone laughs) The keeper at Miller Park Zoo in Bloomington, Erik Heinonen, thank you so much for being with us on "At Issue."

- Thank you.

- And we appreciate your being with us on "At Issue."

We hope you join us next time for another edition when we're going to be talking about newspaper deserts.

1/5th of Americans live in areas where there is no newspaper.

We'll talk about that next time.

(upbeat cheerful music) (upbeat cheerful music continues) (upbeat cheerful music continues) (upbeat cheerful music continues) (upbeat cheerful music winding down)