If I could talk with the animals

 Last winter I made my first drawing trip to the zoo, new sketchbook and membership card in hand. But it’d been years since I’d done anything artistic and my expectations weren’t high.

One of my first stops that day was the gorillas. While I stood there, one of the apes walked over, turned his back, and took a dump right in front of me. He then scooped it up, sniffed it, and...do you know where this is going?  He ate it. Not just ate it—savored it, in small bites, like he was enjoying the robust flavor.

I wondered about his behavior—was it typical for a gorilla? A sign of boredom? Of a nutrient deficiency? Chuckling to myself, I did a quick sketch and walked on.

A few minutes later I found myself in front of the giraffes. Within moments, one of them started pissing. Another saw it, leaned in, and began lapping away at the falling yellow stream. While one bit of animal weirdness hadn’t bothered me, two gave me the giggles.

From there I headed to the meerkats, hoping for less titillating experience. But this wasn’t meant to be, because in the next display two large parrots were nothing but a flapping, squawking union of bird sex. I was drawn to them, like being compelled to look at a car crash as you drove by, and spent the next 20 minutes watching them do the ornithological bop before I gave up and decided to be happy with my one half-assed, gorilla-eating-poo sketch.

As I walked home I tried to make sense of all this, wondering what the animals—the universe? God? the zoological spirits? —had been trying to tell me.  Regardless, I knew I was excited to come back.

Following zoo visits showed that this type of debauchery was far rarer then my initial experience suggested. Nonetheless, I quickly became addicted to drawing the animals. I found a kind of wonder in the experience that touched the little boy in me who had a subscription to Ranger Rick magazine and beat up the kid down the street for killing rabbits.

This feeling of wonder has been furthered by the unexpected reactions the animals have had to my sitting and sketching for hours—the one still face in a constantly-flowing stream of passers-by. Some get skittish, as if spotting a predator, like the time I sent a troupe of giraffes galloping away with a sneeze. Others, like the orangutans, seem to think I’m a zookeeper bringing food and start tapping on the glass.

Better are the animals who don’t like me or think I might be prey. The king cobra slid over scary as hell and totally bad-ass, splayed across its habitat like it was daring me to step on it. The komodo dragon was similarly bold, deliberately coming over and putting its face right in front of mine, poisonous saliva lathering on its lips. Or the jaguar, whose eyes locked onto mine from a raised perch and clearly told me how different our relationship would be in another time and place.

By far, the best moment so far has been when a young lioness took notice of me squatting down to get an eye-level view. She zoned in on me, did the butt-in-the-air pouncy thing, then closed the 20’ gap between us in a heartbeat and tried to swipe at my head through the glass. Then she started jumping around like a playful cat, so I acted the cat toy and for the next few minutes we danced and played peek-a-boo around a pillar.

The feeling of wonder these connections provide is has been at least as important in keeping me coming back as my desire make art. Truly inspiring in the most literal sense of the word.

More of my drawings done at the Woodland Park Zoo can be found at my flickr page.