No Tedious Job

Anybody who has balanced a checkbook knows that record-keeping can be tedious. In zoos, however, there are people whose purpose is to maintain lists that are so important that they affect the lives of many zoo animals and can determine which animals you see on exhibit. These people are called studbook keepers.
 
A studbook is a record of all individual animals of a particular species living in zoos in either North America or the entire world (depending on the scope of the studbook). The types of details kept in a studbook include who an animal's parents are, where and when the animal was born, how often and where the animal has moved among zoos, and eventually when and why it died.
 
Think of a studbook as a kind of family tree. Like any family, some members must breed to sustain future generations. By tracking who is related to whom, studbook keepers indicate which unrelated individuals can breed together, thus maintaining a genetically healthy zoo population. Since many studbooks are for endangered species, this type of information is very important.
 
Studbook keepers don't make decisions about animal moves among zoos. These decisions are the responsibility of other people called population managers, whose job is to ensure the sustainability of a species and to make sure that individuals are living comfortable lives in appropriate social groupings. But population managers can't figure out who goes where without the information provided by studbook keepers.
 
For studbook keepers, the payoff is extraordinary: the satisfaction of knowing that they have helped save an endangered species (if applicable), improved the lives of individual animals, and kept animals from being collected from the wild to sustain zoo populations.
 
Staff here at the Chicago Zoological Society, which manages Brookfield Zoo, are studbook keepers for nine groups of animals: Humboldt penguins, capuchin and callimico monkeys, African wild dogs, Inca terns, side-necked turtles, aardvarks, California sea lions, and tanagers. Of these, the penguins, callimicos, and African wild dogs are considered endangered.

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