Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film

4. Wildlife Conservation through a Wide-Angle Lens [Includes Image Plates]

Chapter Four wildlife conservation through a wide-angle lens wildlife conservation through a wide-angle lens In 1940 the New York Zoological Society, under the direction of its president, Fair~eld Osborn, launched a major change in animal exhibition at the New York Zoological Park. The year marked the “beginning of the end,” in Osborn’s words, “of exhibiting our animal collections behind bars.” While zoos in the past had displayed animals according to “man-made classi~cations” of orders and families, by the spring of 1941 a visitor to the Bronx Zoo could witness a scene of animal life on a realistic African veldt. Entering from a gate suggestive of an African village, the spectator encountered a savannah with zebras, warthogs, numerous species of antelope, cranes, and ground birds of various shapes and hues traversing the plains or refreshing themselves at the water hole. On a high rock outcrop, one might see lions. Like the concealed enclosures used to ~lm animal scenes in ~lms such as Chang and The Silent Enemy, the area was large enough to allow free movement of the animals, yet small enough to ensure every visitor an experience of African animal life unobstructed by bars or fences, but without 85 the danger of safari. The large size also helped conceal the “synthetic habitat planting” of _at-topped elms, Texas water locusts, mountain holly, and a multitude of exotic and native plant species carefully selected and manicured to convey the look of Africa.1 Nearly 85,000 visitors walked through the gates of the African Plains exhibit on opening day, 1 May 1941. It was the largest single day’s attendance since the opening of the New York Zoological Park in 1899. Over 3 million people came by year’s end. Disturbed by the pounding guns and death cries of a battle-scarred Europe, visitors on opening day found solace in Osborn’s address. “We are here to greet this sight,” Osborn declared, “and millions of others will do likewise before the year is out, grateful for an hour of recreation, snatched from these troubled days. We can be refreshed for a while from the spectacle of man’s cruel and needless destruction of himself. We should have no patience with those unthinking persons who rant that man, in his present cruelties, is reverting to primitive nature —to the so-called law of the jungle. No greater falsehood could be spoken. Nature,” Osborn intoned, “knows no such horrors.”2 Only a decade earlier the law of the jungle had pervaded the presentation of nature in natural history museums, zoos, and travelogue-expedition ~lm. Filmmakers had portrayed the spectacle of death and the struggle for existence as life’s central drama in part to attract box-of~ce crowds. But in the midst of the Second World War, a more peaceful side to nature appealed to both scientists and the public. The human species provided enough violent drama. Nature offered a reprieve from a war-torn world.3 The African Plains exempli~ed this benign vision. The exhibit marked, in Osborn’s words, the “opening of a new vista to the wonders of nature.” It was a panoramic viewpoint that offered the public insight into the “interdependence and social relationships” of living forms and provided “a miracle-story” centered on the intricate web of life.4 Only through a comprehensive, wide-angle view of the landscape could one begin to discern the interrelationships among organisms and their environment integral in maintaining the balance of nature. By the late 1940s nature ~lms produced by the New York Zoological Society in the interests of conservation also reinforced this perspective. Osborn, as one of the most outspoken leaders of conservation in the aftermath of the Second World War, saw the African Plains exhibit as a starting point in making the public aware of the need for conservation—not just of individual species, but of the natural environment and resources of 86 reel nature the area occupied by wildlife.5 In striving to recreate the ecological integrity of a particular habitat, the African Plains exhibit marked a departure from past efforts to develop naturalistic habitat displays. Contrary to Osborn’s claims, the pioneering techniques used to create the African Plains exhibit were not new. In 1907, the animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck introduced naturalistic habitat displays using moated and barless enclosures in his famous Tierpark in Stellingen, Germany, which included an African “panorama.” In mixing species of different zoogeographic regions within a...