York Town News
Keeping it wild
By Melissa Wood
Beautiful butterflies like these can be seen at York’s own “Butterfly Kingdom” at York’s Wild Kingdom.
Photo by Katie Rasche
Mika Nurmikko, seen here, has been director of York’s Wild Kingdom for the past 20 years. He works from sun-up to sundown, but says there’s still never enough time to do everything he wants to do in his passion for ecology.
Photo by Katie Rasche
Two macaws manipulate a foraging device to get the food stored inside the cavities. The devices were designed and created by zoo director Mika Nurmikko. The devices are used to keep the zoo animals mentally stimulated by replicating their behavior in the wild, where they spend 60 to 80 percent of their time foraging for food.
Photo by Melissa Wood
YORK BEACH - As director of York's Wild Animal Kingdom, Mika Nurmikko said that about eight years ago he started taking a different approach to taking care of the 100-plus species that live on the zoo's 85 acres.
Nurmikko said he wants people who visit the zoo to understand animals for what they are in their own right, describing what he realized was the "brilliance of animals' minds and the complexities of their behavior."
Nurmikko said that means hands-off, and not giving the animals human names.
"Because they are so interesting, I don't want to humanize them," said Nurmikko. "We're about the only ones who don't give a human name to the animals. ... We don't take the animals to schools because to be able to take them you have to hand-raise them."
Training animals to be "human," he explained, hurts their mental abilities, leading them to show signs of neurotic behavior - parrots that pull out their own feathers, or monkeys that live in trees but spend all of their time on the ground.
"I can't destroy a perfect mind anymore," said Nurmikko. "It didn't make sense."
That passion drives Nurmikko to work from sun-up to sundown, putting in 100-hour weeks, inventing and building foraging devices to stimulate the mental abilities, designing new exhibits that include cultural information on the parts of the world from where the animals have come, coordinating animal DNA testing with University of California-Davis, and running the zoo's sister operation, Monkey Park in Costa Rica, which rescues and rehabilitates howler monkeys that have been hurt by that country's rapidly growing development.
"I start at 4 or 4:15 every morning, and I go on until I can't anymore," said Nurmikko.
He's seen the adverse affects too much "humanizing" can do to animals. He often gets calls from bird owners asking if they can bring their pets to the zoo, and although they can't take them all in, many of the zoo's birds are former pets.
"The human is a very young species compared to the rest of ecology," said Nurmikko.
Nurmikko said the purpose of the foraging units was to replicate conditions in the wild where animals have to work hard for their food. So far he has come up with 36 designs of units, mostly for parrots and primates, where the animals either have to do things like spin a wheel, push in a tray or complete a combination of tasks to reach their food, which is - one way or another blocked - in cavities that the animals have to figure out how to manipulate.
"We have the best and lengthiest mental activities for parrots and primates in the country," said Nurmikko.
He said with the foraging units the two macaws, for example, can spend between five and six hours retrieving food that would take 17 minutes to eat if just put in a dish. In the wild, Nurmikko explained, parrots typically spend 60 to 80 percent of their time looking for food.
Nurmikko, who has been the zoo's director for 20 years, said he first became interested in ecology as a 13-year-old, fishing full time off the coast of Finland where he grew up.
"I learned very quickly if you take all the fish, there's nothing left," he said.
He's concerned that wild animals have less and less natural habitat.
"The number of wild animals is being reduced every day," said Nurmikko. "The balance isn't there anymore ... the bottom line is ecology is in trouble."
He said his approach was confirmed when he first visited Costa Rica four years ago and started rebuilding Monkey Park in Tamrindo, a region he said was nothing more than a gravel road six years ago, and last year opened a Pizza Hut.
"It is so bad, it's unbelievable," said Nurmikko, who said that while the park is supported by York's Wild Kingdom, he also donates part of his own paycheck and proceeds from the sale of foraging units to other zoos.
Nurmikko spends three months a year in the winter in Costa Rica living in a house on the grounds while coming up with new methods for rehabilitating the howler monkeys that are frequently electrocuted by power lines.
Nurmikko explained that because the monkeys are arboreal, they live and do everything in trees, and use the lines to cross the ever-increasing roads in the area. The monkeys have prehensile tails that can grasp objects and are often electrocuted when they touch two wires at once.
"The ones that survive come to Monkey Park with severe burns and medical problems," said Nurmikko, who added that young monkeys being carried by their mothers are often hurt when they fall to the ground after their mothers are electrocuted.
To combat this problem, Nurmikko said the monkeys at the park who are undergoing rehabilitation are also being trained to stay away from the wires, setting up replicas of utility poles that give a low voltage shock. Nurmikko is working with the Costa Rican government to build rope bridges - made up of a different material and color than the power lines - to allow the monkeys to cross roads safely.
Nurmikko stressed that at all times the humans and monkeys have no contact, and the younger monkeys learn how to behave from observing older ones before they can be released.
"There's nothing I can possibly teach a wild animal," said Nurmikko. "They don't need a GPS to fly; they don't have maps; they don't have cell phones. What can I possibly teach a brilliant life form like that?"
But Nurmikko can and does share his passion for ecology with York's Wild Kingdom's visitors, often pulling aside people at the park to talk about the animals.
York Animal Control Officer Tom Porter recently visited the park in response to an animal rights group's complaint that the exhibits were ugly. Porter said he ended up spending two hours with Nurmikko learning about ecology and how the animals are taken care of at the zoo, including the fact that the soil in each exhibit is dug up and replaced each year.
Nurmikko is also constantly coming up with new designs for the exhibits and other ways to mentally stimulate the animals. Last year, he started catching live striped bass, which he puts in a pond for the white Bengal tigers to catch. The prairie dogs live in a re-created Alamo, which was designed not only to make an interesting exhibit but also to represent ecology's last stand.
"Basically they've given me free autonomy for 20 years," Nurmikko said of the park's owners. "I respect them highly for giving me that, and it shows in the exhibits."
He credits his staff for being just as diehard as he is in doing what's ecologically correct - "every day, all day long" - presenting clean, interesting exhibits to the park's more than 150,000 yearly visitors.
Two years ago the zoo opened Butterfly Kingdom, an enclosed exhibit where 200 to 500 butterflies are brought in from Costa Rica every two weeks. You can watch them hatch from their chrysalis, then fly freely around the interior that re-creates the tropical rainforest environment in Central America with a waterfall and lush foliage.
Outside the exhibit is a walkway through a garden with two exhibits that have extra special meaning to Nurmikko. A gazebo that houses two parakeets is dedicated to his mother, Maija, and Nurmikko places a new rose inside it every week.
Further down the pathway, a second exhibit is dedicated to his father Veikko, a Finnish biochemist who performed the first gene transfer in 1957. Nurmikko's father painted surrealist butterflies and lichen, and digital reproductions of those paintings are in a re-created studio that gives the birds inside a place to perch.
When asked if he was concerned about discussions surrounding the potential sale and redevelopment of the property, Nurmikko said he couldn't think about that because it was beyond his control.
"This is my paradise away from paradise," said Nurmikko.
