Southern faces

Southern Living, Nov 1996 by Rada, Joe

CALL OF THE WILD

Dr. Richard Cambre, head veterinarian at the National Zoological Park, totes a gray box on his rounds. A morning's case load might include performing surgery on a shrew, treating an injured orangutan, examining an ailing cheetah's paw, and drawing a blood sample from a shorebird. With about 5,000 animals of nearly 500 species to care for, the afternoon could bring any number of challenges.

New Orleans born and raised, Richard was bitten early on (and quite literally) with an interest in animal health. "My first zoo job out of college [LSU] included caring for 52 monkeys crammed into one cage," he recalls. "Zoo workers got bitten and scratched all the time. And no one knew then that the monkeys might carry the herpes-B virus, which can be fatal to humans."

Surviving that discovery, he returned to LSU for a doctorate in veterinary medicine, gained two decades of experience at zoos in St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, and Denver, and reached the National Zoo's top post in 1994.

Linda Moore, a Washington, D.C., native, took a much different route to the zoo, starting out as a volunteer 18 years ago before landing a permanent job. At first she tended to mice, weasels, and otters, then later to bears and lions. Now she works with raptors and conducts popular feeding-time demonstrations with playful seals and sea lions.

Her animal interests show in the earrings dangling from her lobes. She has quite a collection of stylized seals, eagles, and feathers. "I have to be really careful which pair I wear around the hawks," she says."They peck at them and try to pull them out."

The National Zoo's most famous resident-Hsing-Hsing the giant panda that China gave to the United States in 1972-has a Southern keeper. Dianne Murnane hails from a scant 8 miles away across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, while her lumbering charge traveled 12,000 miles from Asia to be here.

"I had hamsters and gerbils and parakeets as a child, pets that could fit in military-base housing where my family lived," Dianne says as she prepares Hsing-Hsing's bucket filling rations of rice, sweet potatoes, carrots, and apples. "I begged my parents for a puppy until they about tore their hair out. Now here I am with a 280-pound panda."

VARIETY COUNTS

Other museums in the Smithsonian family harbor pockets of Southernness too. Confederate postage stamps were among the first items collected for what became the National Postal Museum. The faces of Jefferson Davis, Pocahontas, Bessie Smith, Arthur Ashe, and many other noteworthy Southerners peer from canvases at the National Portrait Gallery. Glass art by renowned North Carolinian Harvey Littleton glitters at Renwick Gallery.

A new facility planned in Washington for the National Museum of the American Indian also will include artifacts drawn from our region. Perhaps one day we Southern visitors will recognize a tour guide's accent there, and yet another corner of the Smithsonian will hit a little closer to home.

For more information about the Smithsonian see page 27