The Tree Kangaroos Died!

Buried in an P-I article about "The Jane Goodall of tree kangaroos" is this sad information:

The Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle had two [tree kangaroos] until this past spring, when its female died at about age 13 1/2 from complications of avian tuberculosis. An 18-year-old male died a month ago of old age. The zoo is now seeking replacements from other zoos.

The fuzzy, furry, awkward animals were in the "Day and Night Exhibits" building (where all the snakes are), near the zoo's west entrance. Seattlest used to go there on Sunday mornings and watch the tree kangaroos--which are found mostly in Papau New Guinea--do their little tree kangaroo thing.

The label near the tree kangaroos claimed that animals are (paraphrase) "perfectly adapted for living in the trees," but after watching them for five minutes, you realized that this was patently untrue. They were very tentative, careful climbers--they do about as well as you'd expect a kangaroo in a tree to do. Clearly they were forced up there by some prehistoric predator. Perfectly adapted, no, but like the rest of us, they make do. And they are ADORABLE.

We asked the zoo when they might get some new tree kangaroos, and curator Dana Payne provided this answer:

Unfortunately, the North American tree kangaroo population is in gradual decline, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to replace animals after they pass on. They're an extraordinarily sensitive species and are especially susceptible to avian tuberculosis -- something that's usually not an issue for mammals.

Because of our commitment to tree conservation field work (our conservation director heads up a tree kangaroo research and conservation project on the Huon Peninsula in Papua New Guinea), we would like to continue to display tree kangaroos, to build on that connection between the visitor's appreciation for the zoo animals and conservation of the same species in the wild. We have reproduced tree kangaroos at Woodland Park and would very much like to do so again. So we are currently evaluating the health histories of two animals that have been suggested as possibly being available for transfer to Woodland Park Zoo. Since I'm not confident we'll accept either one, it's hard to answer the timeline question.

That conservation work is being done by the aforementioned "Jane Goodall of Tree Kangaroos," Woodland Park Zoo Conservation Director Dr. Lisa Dabek, who's the subject of a new children's book about her endeavors.