Animal Kingdom

The Tulsa Zoo prepares for a makeover

Lindsey Henderson is an energetic advocate for an 87 year-old mini city within Tulsa. 

It's a little burg populated exclusively by over 1,500 animals from 436 species—denizens of every continent on Earth. Henderson and her colleagues at the Tulsa Zoo and its non-profit management partner, Tulsa Zoo Management Inc., want to ensure that Tulsa continues to have an accessible, pacesetting window to the wild for children and adults. And Henderson and her team want to eliven a signature Green Country asset that draws well-over 600,000 visitors a year.

Recently, Tulsa voters gave the go-ahead for a $25 million zoo improvement package—a critical augment to the $40 million-plus sum garnered via fundraising—that will fund an ambitious elephant enclave, a re-designed zoo front entrance and a long-sought animal preservation-and-research initiative. An augmented tiger exhibition and a carnivore mini-territory are also parts of this $100 million, twenty-year master plan that will create a powerful trajectory for the future of the Tulsa Zoo.

As the zoo’s vice president for development, Hendserson wears multiple hats: fundraiser, animal preservationist, and public educator. She is what Malcolm Gladwell might call a “connector.” She and her team have secured large donors in Green Country and strategic national and international partners including the International Elephant Foundation and the Snow Leopard Trust.

An eleven-year Tulsa Zoo veteran, Henderson became an animal kingdom enthusiast because of her passionate and inventive Tulsa parents. They often “placed” her and her brother at the zoo, which became their alternative to daycare.

“My dad was on the board of Tulsa Zoo Friends when I was really little and he used to do a kind of amazing daycare for me and my brother through the zoo,” Henderson told me. “I'd be out there and I'd flag anyone with a golf cart—I knew they could take me around and get me access to the animals. It sparked the passion I have for species preservation and protecting animals, and my interest in helping other people to experience wild animals. The zoo is the only place where [local] children have the opportunity to see a tiger or an elephant.”

Henderson wants to make her childhood engagement with animals a routine adventure for visitors to the zoo—from the little to the adult.

“My brother and I were at the zoo all the time when we were growing up. We were founding members of the ‘Buzzby and Denny’ Rhino Club. We would go out to the zoo to do overnights and special events with the education department … we got to see the animals up close. It was a unique experience and one that really isn't the norm with our current exhibitions ... I want to help make that experience available to every child, every single person who comes to the zoo.”
 

To that end, Henderson and her team are working towards the completion of new exhibits, as well as making existing environments more immersive for visitors, something that zoos elsewhere have been working on for years.
 

“Because of our past funding allocations, we just weren't able to keep up [with other zoos]. So when we put together the new arrangements to set up Tulsa Zoo Management Inc. and finally got the resources to put our zoo master plan together, we realized we had to rebuild all our exhibitions.”
 

The planned changes at the zoo feature an African enclave, which will have new African painted dog, lion, antelope, bird, and rhino portals. The giraffe exhibit will also be expanded and include a winter-months viewing venue, and the Maasai Village site will be renovated to include new small animal exhibits. Perhaps most exciting is the zoo’s plan to create the world’s largest African elephant exhibition.

“Our new exhibitions are giving the animals what they deserve,” said Henderson. “Better care, more space and more choices.”

For more from Ray, read his article on the legacy of John Hope Franklin.