The John Ball Zoo has been working hard to prepare its new state-of-the art pygmy hippo exhibit. Tune into this episode of Money, I’m Home as Lynne is joined by the zoo’s Director of Facilities, Planning & Sustainability Allmon Forrester to discuss the progress and learn a few fun facts about pygmy hippos along the way.

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0:00:07.7 Lynne Jarman-Johnson (LJJ): Money, I’m Home. Welcome in. I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. Thank you so much for joining us. From finance to fitness, we have it all, and we also like to throw in a little bit of fun. This year we have a great amount of fun. You could say it’s small, but actually it’s pretty big. We are talking today to Allmon Forrester. He is the director of Facilities, Planning & Sustainability with the John Ball Zoo. And I’m telling you what, Allmon, I am more excited about this podcast because there are some “pygmy”… And I put that in quotation marks, you can’t see that on a podcast, but it’s there… Hippos coming our way. Thanks for joining us today!

0:00:49.9 Allmon Forrester (AF): Certainly, glad to be here. This is a great opportunity, if not for the zoo, but for the community and all of West Michigan.

0:00:55.5 LJJ: I’ll tell you what, I’ve had a chance to walk through the Pygmy Hippo exhibit as it is being built. I think spring 2023 is when this is going to open up. And this is going to be for everybody across the state of Michigan, not just West Michigan. We’re so excited.

0:01:10.5 AF: Yeah, it is. And we have attendance at our zoo from all 83 counties in Michigan, as well as all 50 states in the Union. So, we have quite a few folks that come in. We’re one of those hidden gems that people don’t think we’re as big as we are, but we see almost 600,000 people every year. And most of them come in between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

0:01:30.1 LJJ: There’s so many things happening. The entryway is being completely revamped. That is a beautiful entryway. I grew up here in West Michigan, and so I remember the big, long hill that you had to push my kids up in this stroller and that now is a sloping beautiful entryway. It’s so exciting. So, tell us a little bit about how did you decide on pygmy hippos?

0:01:52.9 AF: Well, we wanted to have a spectacular animal down front. We want to be a zoo for all. And that’s for anybody from socioeconomic areas to physical capabilities to the older generation. And also a number one demographic is a mom with two and a half kids, right? We have 108 foot of elevation change here on our site. So it’s like an 11-story building. People are actually going up and pretty much after you leave the parking lot, it’s uphill all the way. So again, trying to be a zoo for all, targeted to have a 5% or lower slope, wherever we can put that. And that’s pretty much we can do the whole front area so that people can enjoy and not be out of breath when they get up top, be able to talk and communicate.

0:02:35.3 AF: Our front entry area, we wanted to have a, how waters connect us all. That was an underlying theme through our Time to Soar campaign, how water truly does connect us all, especially being in West Michigan with the Grand River and Lake Michigan. We’ve actually reduced our water usage over the past two decades by 80%. We’ve actually saved a billion gallons of water since 2002. And we said, you know what? Let’s really go after this.

0:03:02.4 AF: We also did it with storm water. We’re now taking all of our storm water inside the zoo proper and putting it down through an infiltration basin and keeping it on site as long as we can to release it slowly so we can positively impact 83 million gallons of storm water every year. So, with water being so important to us, having water being that component piece and what animals out there that need conservation work, that also water’s important. And pygmy hippo’s bubbled up because they’re really at animal of need. There’s only about 3,400 of them in the wild, so not very many at all. And there’s only, I think, 23 zoos that actually have pygmy hippos in their collection.

0:03:46.4 LJJ: And hippos, they spend how much of their time in the water?

0:03:50.4 AF: Well, the pygmy hippos are a little different than Nile hippos. Not only the size is different. Pygmy hippos are about 400 or 500 pounds, but the Niles, they’ll be an average 4,00-6,000 pounds. So pygmy hippos are solitary animals. They live in more of the Congo region, rainforest areas, more in the streams and rivers and heavy rainforest areas. The difference is, pygmies like to be wet. So, moist conditions in a rainforest, we don’t have a lot of moist conditions as much. It may seem like that in the summer when it’s 80% humidity, right?

0:04:27.7 AF: They’ll spend a lot of time in the water just because they like to be wet. They actually exude this milky substance from their skin to help it from getting sunburnt. So, it’s something that they’ve developed over years, so that.

0:04:43.3 LJJ: Wow.

0:04:44.3 AF: For our keepers who will be handling the animals and there’ll be a milky substance on them. That doesn’t look… You’ve got to get pretty close to see it, but it’s some nature sunscreen, so it’s pretty awesome. I don’t think I’d rub it on their back and rub it on the face. I don’t think I’d go that route. But…

0:05:00.9 LJJ: It does sound like you could bottle it though, Allmon. [laughter]

0:05:03.4 AF: Oh, maybe we could sell it in our gift shop. It’s kind of cool. The thing about the water part of it is that they actually got their own little showers in their holding area as well as out in the habitat. So, we taught them to punch a button that will activate like a showerhead because they want to stay wet all the time. We learned that trick from Louisville Zoo. When we started talking about pygmy hippos, one thing great about being part of the AZA, Association of Zoos and Aquariums, is that we can network with the best of the best throughout the country. So, we reached out to some of our counterparts that already had them, how they’re successful. We could learn from that so we can continue to build more successful habitats. One of them is a little shower. So that’s how we settled on the pygmy hippos, the water component, the real need for conservation effort with those animals, them being unique and not in a lot of different zoos and aquariums across the country.

0:05:55.0 AF: But we’re also taking it up a notch. We’re actually having a multi-species habitat for pygmy hippos, which is very unique. We’ll be the only one in the country that will have more than two species. Actually, we’ll have about three species out there at one time. We have the pygmy hippo. We’ll have sitatunga, which are kind of a forested water antelope. We’ll also have some cranes, some birds out there as well.

0:06:23.5 AF: Only San Diego Zoo is actually exhibiting pygmies with other animals, and they’re doing it with primates that don’t play in the same space. So, we got three animals playing in the same space. So that’s going to be kind of interesting. We developed a holding building that’s very complex so we can move animals around and get them introduced to each other to be able to have multiple animal species as well as multiple animals at the same time. So, it will be by far the best, most spectacular pygmy hippo habitat in the country.

0:06:52.7 LJJ: I’ll tell you what, Consumers is really proud. We are the interactive play partner with this, and that’s going to lead to a lot of fun over the year once we open this up and give for some great picture taking and some social media posts. And I bet we’re going to throw in some free zoo tickets too. So, it should be pretty fun. I cannot thank you enough. It’s so fascinating to me, Allmon, to listen to how there’s so many different pieces and parts and different levels of education and understanding to bring something like this together. I would love it if you’d like to be on every once in a while to talk about other components of the zoo, because I don’t think people really realize how amazing the educators are and the vets and everything that goes into making sure that we have a wonderful active zoo.

0:07:41.4 AF: One thing that probably we’re our own worst enemies because we don’t tell our story enough. Because we really want to provide a good educational experience, a great conservation effort for our animals. And sometimes the tooting our own horn doesn’t get out as much as we really should, but there are some just awesome, some fantastic things that happen. And I could go on for hours on the impact we’re having on individual families on some of our pollinator species of plants, our plants are for insects and birds. We’ve actually brought back the Poweshiek butterfly from basic extinction. Okay, so they’re here. We got… The only ones that are in the country are here.

0:08:30.2 LJJ: Wow.

0:08:31.0 AF: We are working on, and our conservation doesn’t stop at animals. It also, it goes in the environment as well. Part of the pygmy hippo is that we’re doing what’s called Living Building Challenge. And for those of you who know what LEED building is, it’s LEED platinum on steroids. So LEED’s been out about 25 years and LEED’s goal is to reduce the damage. Living Building Challenge, or LBC as we call it, is there to restore the damage that’s done. So, we are reducing our water use by 50% from baseline for this whole project to front entry, energy use by 70%. All the construction, waste, and demolition waste, over 90% of reduction in that from landfill incinerator. We affect positively the wellness of people. We’ve even got an adult changing table at our comfort station down on the front restroom. Again, we want to be a zoo for all and meet people, and meet their needs as they come and enjoy the zoo.

0:09:31.7 LJJ: Well, I’ll tell you what, we are looking forward then to having you more often here on Money I’m Home. And what a great gift to the community. You are too, Allmon. Thank you for your education and your insight. I did ask you at the beginning of, off the mic, how long you’ve been in this position or at least at the zoo. And your comment was?

0:09:57.6 AF: Since the turn of the century.

0:09:57.9 LJJ: Well, I’ll tell you, we’ve got the experts for you here. I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. Thank you, Jake Esselink, for your production skills. Again, Allmon, thanks so much for being with us and we look forward to having you back on a lot this year.

0:10:14.3 AF: My pleasure. More than happy to. Thank you.

0:10:16.7 LJJ: Have a wonderful week, everybody.

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