The Icelandic Canadian - 01.09.1981, Síða 43

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
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It’s a custom-made, large glassed-in ex-
hibit kept at a constant 50 degrees Fahren-
heit and with a double-filtration ventilation
system to assure air purity. A local artist
painted the interior walls of the display area
to resemble the rugged homeland of the
Westmans, and Wikenhauser had his assis-
tants fashion lifelike burrows into a sloping,
concrete rear wall. The final touch was a
goodly-sized swimming pool whose water
level could be altered several times a day, to
encourage the young birds to exercise them-
selves by paddling around in the water when
the level was raised and to leave the pool
when the level was dropped so that zoo
keepers might clean the area.
Although three casualties occurred dur-
ing the first few weeks, the 17 other puf-
flings seemed to thrive in their new home.
What’s more, several have become local TV
celebrities.
“Old One-Eye,” so named because he
lost an eye as the result of an infection, has
appeared on the zoo’s weekly TV show in
Peoria witlj great regularity. He hops eager-
ly onto Wikenhauser’s hand, walks around
his shoulders, eats from his fingers, and
even delights in mugging for the camera.
The rest of the time he sits quietly on a table
as the zoo director proceeds with the show,
exhibiting other animals or discoursing on
the homelands or life cycles of the zoo’s
inhabitants.
Others to appear regularly on the WEEK-
TV show are Numbers 6, 11 and 15. Num-
bers 6,11, and 15?
“Except for Old One-Eye we decided to
identify each of the birds by the order I
obtained them in the Westmans,” Wiken-
hauser explains. Each is banded with his
number around a leg, but so well do the
director and zoo keeper Barbara Jesse know
each of the puffins now that the humans can
single out birds by individual personality
quirks, shadings of color, or the way each
swims or walks.
“And also by how hammy each gets
when passersby peer in at them,” Wiken-
hauser says. Some of the birds put on a real
show for watchers, including doing back-
flips in the water, darting around under-
water, and flapping up a storm.
Although the pufflings will not take on a
full appearance of an adult puffin for an-
other few years, their beaks are beginning to
broaden and the first striations of color are in
evidence. So popular have the birds become
with local folk that many Peorians have
made repeated visits to the zoo over a period
of weeks to see how their new-found friends
from just below the Arctic Circle are pro-
gressing.
The normal life span of the puffin in the
wild is 10 years or slightly more, according
to Wikenhauser. But the meticulous care the
beautiful zoo’s feathered residents receive
will almost certainly increase that by a year
or more. For a long time the specially ob-
tained smelt the puffins dine on were treated
with a vitamin supplement and each bird is
carefully examined on a regular basis to
assure that he or she’s in fine fettle.
By age five or six the birds will also be
parents themselves, increasing the puffin
population at Glen Oak and inspiring a
whole new wave of attention for the unusual
colony.
Sometime soon, eight or nine of the Glen
Oak puffins will be culled from the exhibit
and dispatched to the new Baltimore Aquar-
ium, set to open around the Fourth of July
this year. A special exhibit solely for the
puffins is being readied at this municipal
institution now under construction in down-
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