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William G. Conway, an animal conservationist who redefined (however didn’t rename) the Bronx Zoo, and who helped recast America’s city wildlife parks into crowd-pleasing pure habitats designed to generate help for endangered species worldwide, died on Oct. 21 in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 91.
His loss of life, in a hospital, was introduced by the Wildlife Conservation Society, the place he had spent nearly his total profession. He joined the society in 1956 as an assistant hen curator and retired in 1999 as president and normal director.
Dr. Conway single-mindedly remodeled the society’s signature attraction within the Bronx from a well-known however fusty cloister for neurotic caged specimens into a group of lush pure environments the place the animals presumably felt extra at house, and the place guests benefited from a extra genuine academic expertise.
On his watch, the Bronx Zoo opened the Youngsters’s Zoo and reveals together with World of Birds, JungleWorld, the Baboon Reserve and the 6.5-acre Congo Gorilla Forest.
“Right now the Bronx Zoo/Wildlife Conservation Park accommodates extra examples of progressive zoo exhibit design than another, virtually all of them primarily based on ideas by William Conway,” David Hancocks, an architect and designer of zoos and nature facilities, wrote in “A Completely different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Unsure Future” (2002).
Dr. Conway’s tweedy apparel, and his use of Britishisms like “cheerio,” urged that he hailed from the Midlands quite than the Midwest (he was born in St. Louis).
However New York officers found that there was a flinty negotiator behind that facade within the Eighties, when the conservation society assumed duty from town authorities for managing and renovating the impoverished municipal zoos in Central Park, Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, in addition to the New York Aquarium in Coney Island.
By the point Dr. Conway retired after 43 years, the society was concerned in additional than 300 conservation initiatives in 52 international locations. Within the previous decade, attendance on the metropolis’s zoos and aquarium had grown to 4.4 million from 3.1 million; the society’s funds had greater than doubled, to $78 million; membership had tripled, to just about 95,000; and personal fund-raising had doubled, to $21 million.
Dr. Conway tactfully named animals after wealthy benefactors: Astor the elephant for the society matron Brooke Astor; 11 giraffes for James Walter Carter, a coal mogul. Requested in 1999 whether or not solely oligarchs get naming rights, he advised The New York Occasions, “I confess there are a pair of gibbons at JungleWorld named for my spouse and myself.”
Dr. Conway “redefined what zoos and aquariums must be and the way they need to function,” Jim Breheny, the director of the Bronx Zoo, mentioned in a press release after Dr. Conway’s loss of life, including that on the society, and as president of the American Zoological Affiliation, Dr. Conway targeted on “care, ethics, integrity and conservation,” together with swapping animals between zoos to enhance the probability for breeding and genetic variety.
One metric that has not elevated at New York’s zoos is the variety of elephants, now down to 2 within the Bronx. (When one gave beginning in 1981 to a 180-pound bull calf, Dr. Conway proudly declared, “It’s the primary elephant born within the New York space in about 9,500 years, though I assume that was a mammoth.”)
In 2006, after a number of elephants on the zoo had died of illness or accidents, Mr. Breheny introduced that no extra can be acquired. (Dr. Conway mentioned flamingoes and penguins have been his favourite animals, anyway.) As a substitute, the society would commit its sources to conserving them within the wild.
“The justification for eradicating an animal from the wild for exhibition,” Dr. Conway mentioned in an early report, “should be judged by the worth of that exhibition when it comes to human training and appreciation, and the suitability and effectiveness of the exhibition when it comes to every wild creature’s contentment and continued welfare.”
In recent times, the Nonhuman Rights Mission, an animal-rights group, has been pursuing a habeas corpus case to liberate one of many two elephants nonetheless within the Bronx, a feminine named Pleased, on the grounds that she isn’t.
Whereas Dr. Conway was acclaimed by his colleagues as a conservationist, he exasperated the general public when he stepped into one other area: semantics.
In 1993, he changed the phrase “zoo” (too evocative of confusion and dysfunction, he mentioned) and rebranded the famend establishment within the Bronx because the Worldwide Wildlife Conservation Park (it was formally the New York Zoological Park).
The identify change prompted Daniel Berger to put in writing in The Baltimore Solar, “Endangered species cry out for preservation, as does the language.” In his On Language column in The New York Occasions Journal, William Safire responded extra succinctly by delivering a proverbial “Bronx cheer.”
Ultimately, demonstrating that language and reasoning distinguish people from different animals, officers retained the identify “Bronx Zoo” atop a smaller signal that learn, “Bronx Wildlife Conservation Park.”
“One in 10 voters in america lives inside 50 miles of this zoo, and most won’t ever see any wildlife however starlings, pigeons, roaches and rats,” Dr. Conway advised The Occasions in 1972. “We wish to persuade metropolis those that wildlife is price preserving.”
Dr. Conway was not celebrated for his humorousness, however neither was he routinely unsmiling. In 1968, he wrote a paper titled “Easy methods to Exhibit a Bullfrog: A Mattress-Time Story for Zoo Males.” He as soon as described architects as essentially the most harmful animals in captivity.
In 1962, he gamely appeared on the CBS-TV present “To Inform the Fact,” alongside two impostors additionally claiming to be the youngest director of any zoo in america. The actress and journalist Betty Furness was the only panelist who guessed that he was the true William Conway.
In 1982, he revealed a plaintive letter, supposedly written by a chimpanzee, that concluded: “I’ve been made conscious of the truth that not all human beings are insensitive to the necessity to discover substitutes for monkeys and apes as experimental animals. A colleague known as to my consideration a current deal with by the dean of a outstanding Japanese medical college which states partially, ‘Those that would enter the sector of medical science ought to put together themselves for self -sacrifice.’”
William Gaylord Conway was born on Nov. 20, 1929, in St. Louis to Frederick and Alice (Gaylord) Conway. His father was an artist.
When Invoice was 4, he started assembling a private menagerie by accumulating butterflies, which he introduced to his elementary college upon graduating. As a teen he volunteered on the St. Louis Zoo.
After incomes a level in zoology from Washington College in St. Louis in 1951, he labored on the St. Louis Zoo and helped set up the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs earlier than transferring to the grounds of the Bronx Zoo along with his spouse, Christa Berthoud, a wildlife photographer. They lived there for a time with a parrot named Jimmy, who, Dr. Conway mentioned, possessed “a completely marvelous disreputable vocabulary.” They later moved to New Rochelle.
His spouse is his solely instant survivor.
In 1961, when Mr. Conway was 32, he was named director of the Bronx Zoo. 5 years later, he grew to become normal director of the New York Zoological Society, because the Wildlife Conservation Society was identified on the time. He was appointed the society’s president in 1992.
In 1999, he mentioned he was leaving as a result of he had advised the society’s chairman that 70 appeared like a correct retirement age. “I made a horrible mistake,” he advised The Occasions. “I ought to have mentioned 95.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
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