Bring ’em Back Alive 405 good zoos—are all about.” Unlike Noah’s dove that returns only because it cannot find a place to land, Durrell’s pink pigeon affirms that it is not only once again surviving in its native forest, but includes him in the picture, its ring acknowledging the success of his intervention in effecting the species’ revival, a potent image of humans as caretakers in the midst of Anthropocene devastation. In the end, his role in capture becomes solely ocular, just seeing, capturing his impression of the animal in words, conveyed privately to the reader, without the mediation of other people or technology. IX. Not a Zoo: Jungle Theme Park and Captive Breeding Center The careers of both men culminated in the establishment of their own institutions of captive animals, which they claimed were not zoos because they differed from other zoos at the time in character and intent. The summit of Buck’s enterprises was successfully outbidding the nation’s famous zoos to be the animal entertainment concessionaire at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Instead of displaying animals in the customary taxonomicallygrouped cages, he created a simulacrum of his Malay jungle with an unprecedented number of exotic people (or costumed to be exotic) and animals on American soil for a public eager to participate in the illusion. Riding through the fair on the back of an elephant along with Johnny Weismuller, star of Tarzan, like a rajah surveying his self-made kingdom, he marvels that a poor Texan boy could rise to such heights. After the fair, he transferred the animals to Long Island for his Jungleland theme park that closed in 1944 when wartime shortages of food and workers threatened the closure of many zoos.17 In contrast, Durrell writes about the difficulties of finding a 17 The zoo in Gainsville, Texas where he was born, was renamed the Frank Buck Zoo in 1954.
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