Animals: Air Zoo

For the benefit of rustics, shut-ins, timid people, lazy people, busy people, people sensitive to smells, National Broadcasting Co. last week put a zoo on the air—first time in the U. S. The microphone was carried about the cages in Bronx Zoölogical Park in New York.

Jet, a black chimpanzee, shook the bars of his cage. Irritated, a lion roared into the instrument. Sea lions, excited with fish, grunted and barked. Monkeys chattered, birds screeched, an elephant snorted, a tiger growled, all very obligingly. But Peter, a large hippopotamus, plunged to the bottom of his tank, made not a single grunt. Coyotes, who generally bark when 5 o’clock whistles blow in Manhattan, were fooled by the siren of a fire engine at 4 o’clock, refused to bark again at 5 for the radio audience.

Animal noises seldom before broadcast, have often and with great success been reproduced in sound films. Rin Tin Tin made his first public barks last month (TIME, April 14). Last week, the Newfoundland Labrador Film Co. was developing talkies of seals just made in Labrador and Raymond Ditmars, famed curator of the New York Zoological Gardens, who has already made a sound film of a fight between a mongoose and a cobra, was preparing to make a talkie in an anthill.

Recognizing that humans find the sounds of animals exciting, mysterious, pleasant, Raymond Ditmars suggested that “the terrific crash and turmoil of life inside an anthill” must be comparable to that of a human metropolis. In the Berkshires he found anthills three feet high in each of which some 40,000 ants lived according to the complexities of their harsh and courtly government. In one of these he planned to insert a microphone strong enough to stand being lugged up the side of a mountain, delicate enough to record the clamor of tiny corridors, the swarming of young male and female ants, the uproar of sexless, wingless insects building subterranean castles for their queen.