Animal world
The prevailing word during Tuesday’s Town Hall South was, “Awwww.”
Well, that might not exactly qualify as a word, but it was the sound that reverberated throughout the Upper St. Clair High School auditorium as featured speaker Jack Hanna wrapped up the lecture series’ 47th season.
“Jungle Jack,” as his fans know him, followed pretty much the same format he did on his 102 appearances in three decades on David Letterman’s late-night shows: He brought guests.
They are the ones who elicited the “awwwws,” as audience members expressed their adoration for the likes of a lemur, penguin and two types of leopard.
And just like on Letterman, Hanna’s main goal was education. Those in attendance learned, for example, that although many of the animals he displayed and discussed are endangered, there is reason for hope.
The director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio’s capital city credited zoos across the United States, including the one in Pittsburgh, for helping to ensure as many animal species as possible remain on Earth.
“I don’t want you to think the world is coming to an end, by the way,” Hanna told the audience. “I mean, the world as far as the animal world.”
His guests certainly seemed to be thriving.
First to join Hanna on stage, its image captured by camera and projected on screen for audience members to get a clear view, was a meerkat, a small carnivore belonging to the mongoose family. And “carnivore” is the key word here.
“He doesn’t care what he goes after,” Hanna said. “One thing he will do is eat snakes.”
And by snakes, he means the king cobra – interestingly, the binomial nomenclature for its species is Ophiophagus hannah – and its top length of 18-plus feet.
The meerkat, typically 50 to 80 pounds when grown, executes lightning-quick moves as the snake attempts to strike, making it dizzy before the mammal “bites the cobra’s head off,” Hanna said.
Next up was an African penguin, one of a majority of penguin species with habitats that actually are in warmer climates. More “awwws” greeted the bird as it waddled around the stage like Danny DeVito as Oswald Cobblepot.
Back to the animal class Mammalia, an Amur leopard made a rather dramatic appearance.
“He sees himself on the screen there,” Hanna said, pointing at the projection, “which is not going to be good.”
Sure enough, the cat – which is native to China and Russia, and is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s critically endangered list – tried to leap away from its handler when viewing the image. Also sure enough, the handler held tight.
The leopard then ceded the stage to a ring-tailed lemur, the long appendage for which the wide-eyed primate that lives only in Madagascar takes its name.
“This right here is Slowpoke,” Hanna said, as a special beam was brought out from which a two-toed sloth, native to Central and South America, could hang.
“When you go home and say your life is upside-down, it’s not,” he told the audience. “The sloth’s life is upside-down.”
Yes, whether it’s the two- or three-toed variety, a sloth is born, eats, sleeps, mates, you name it, inverted in a tree.
Hanna’s final guest was a snow leopard, another endangered Asian cat, this one from his home zoo in Columbus.
He spoke about the leopard’s thick tail, which the cats use as a wraparound to keep warm in the Himalayas, and especially its soft, dense fur.
“It’s beyond anything you ever felt,” he said to the audience.
And of course, the response was yet another, “Awwww.”
For more about Jack Hanna, visit www.jackhanna.com.