![]() ![]() Today the zoo's gorilla patriarch, Lamydoc, born in the wild in Cameroon in 1963, is closing in on world's-oldest-gorilla-in-captivity status if he survives a few more years. Burchfield was promoted from Gladys Porter general curator to deputy director in 1988 and became executive director in 2007. Despite their muscularity, snakes are fine-boned and can be easily killed if mishandled, Burchfield said.Īfter serving three years and four months in the military he returned to the Columbus Zoo as head reptile keeper until the summons from Thomas. He developed techniques for gentle handling of the program's snakes to keep them alive and producing. Flowers, acknowledging Burchfield's skills in snake husbandry and management, charged him with improving conditions for the animals and boostingvenom production, which entailed trips to Costa Rica to teach technicians how to handle snakes and extract and process the venom.Īmong the snakes with whom Burchfield became intimately acquainted was the fer-de-lance, or terciopelo, considered one of the world's most dangerous vipers. In partnership with the University of Costa Rica, the project was the genesis of the Clodomiro Picado Institute in San Jose, which today produces most of the snake venom antiserum for Central America, Costa Rica in particular. "It was really cutting-edge stuff back in the 1960s," Burchfield said. At the same time, he was extracting venom from snakes for the biochemists and pathologists who were developing vaccines for military personnel headedoff to Southeast Asia and the tropical Americas. And also by the way you'll be a guinea pig in our active immunization study,' " Burchfield said.īurchfield was one of four GI's who volunteered to be injected with neurotoxic venom from some of the world's deadliest snakes. I need someone to run my snake lab and provide snake venom for the researchers. By coincidence, Flowers had just been tasked with a USAID mission to build a snake venom antiserum production facility in Costa Rica. Herschel Hardin Flowers, at the time the youngest graduate of the University of Florida's veterinary school. His father had heard that the Army was doing something at Fort Knox involving snakes, so Burchfield hopped in his Volkswagen and headed to Kentucky to find out what it was all about.Īt Fort Knox he met a Capt. He volunteered for the Marines but didn't meet the Corps' height requirement, so he joined the Army instead. "He was always saving animals, so we had wild animals in our house from the time I was a small child."īurchfield had graduated to a paid position as zookeeper in Columbus when Vietnam came along. "He would buy a snapping turtle from some kids so they wouldn't hurt it, or bring a bullfrog home, or three red fox kits, which we bottle raised, and ground hogs," Burchfield said. "Bless his heart, he put up with them."ĭespite his queasiness about snakes his father loved all animals, even reptiles, another quality he passed on to his son. "My mom was my accomplice and she supported me, so he had to," Burchfield said. "When I started out as a volunteer at the Columbus Zoo in 1959, as a kid basically, I'd always been interested in reptiles and amphibians and caught them since I was a small boy and dragged them home much to my father's chagrin," he said.īurchfield's dad, with matinee-idol looks and expert marksmanship and archery skills, which he passed on to his son, was petrified of snakes. ![]() Colo was the world's oldest gorilla in captivity when she died in 2017 at the age of 60. Burchfield cared for the young western lowland gorilla at Columbus in the early 1960s. This was the same Warren Thomas who, as a second-year veterinary student at the Columbus Zoo, was featured in Life magazine for saving from stillbirth the world's first captive-born gorilla, Colo, in 1956. "I sent them back with fairly extensive changes recommended, and apparently Dr. "I said sure, send them on up," Burchfield said. Burchfield at the time was head keeper of the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo's new Reptilia-Amphibia Hall, but was asked to review Thomas' blueprints by Gladys Portergeneral curator Tom Hoover, who'd been a fellow zookeeper with Burchfield in Columbus, Burchfield's hometown. Thomas, the zoo's first director, to discuss Burchfield's ideas for the new reptile house Thomas was designing. Burchfield, now in his 51st year with the Gladys Porter Zoo, as Brownsville's wild gem celebrates its own half century of delighting and educating visitors.īurchfield's first trip to Brownsville was at the invitation of Warren D. 8-If anyone was born to run a zoo it's Dr. ![]()
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