Okapi Arrive; the Chimpanzees Leave

2017–2020

Lead: In 2017 the Potawatomi Zoo became, by its own published account, the first AZA-accredited zoo in Indiana to exhibit okapi — the striped, giraffe-kin forest animal of the Congo, among the most coveted exhibits in American zoos — and received two males. The okapi announced the master-plan era's ambition in a single species: this was no longer the collection of the 1947 inventory. Three years later the same professional system that brought the okapi carried away the zoo's oldest residents in the public's affection. The chimpanzees left in stages, each move on the recommendation of the Chimpanzee Species Survival Plan, the AZA's cooperative breeding program. Alex, a twenty-one-year-old male, transferred to the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore in April 2019. The last two, the females Baby Face, aged forty-seven, and Randi, aged thirty-four, moved to Rolling Hills Zoo in Salina, Kansas, in a transfer the zoo announced on 8 September 2020; Baby Face had herself arrived at Potawatomi in 2012. The emptying of the chimpanzee habitat was not an ending but a clearing: the ground the chimps had occupied, on the zoo's east side, was already marked in the zoo's plans for the lions whose return is told two entries below.

Sources:

1. Potawatomi Zoo published history (okapi exhibited from 2017, the first AZA-accredited zoo in Indiana to do so; two males).
2. Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, ZooGram, summer 2019 (Alex's transfer from Potawatomi, April 2019, on the Chimpanzee SSP's recommendation).
3. Potawatomi Zoo release, 8 September 2020 (Baby Face and Randi to Rolling Hills Zoo, Salina, Kansas, on the SSP's recommendation; Baby Face's arrival at Potawatomi in 2012).