ZOOFARI begins Friday night
A live auction at the Gladys Porter Zoo tonight will raise money to build a new aquatic center.
Zoofari ’09: Fiesta Under the Sea, the zoo’s annual fundraiser, will begin tonight at 6 p.m. at the special events center with cocktails, a preview of the auction items, and live music. Dinner begins at 7 p.m., with the auction starting at 7:45 p.m.
"Oh my gosh, we have some really fabulous jewelry," said Cynthia Galvan, marketing director. "There’s jewelry. There’s art; there are fishing trips. We try to balance it out, because we can’t have all of one type of thing. We have stuff for kids. I saw these really neat napkin rings that were crocodiles, and all kinds of stuff that have come in."
The fundraiser will continue Saturday night. The gates will open at 5:30 p.m. and children of all ages can get their faces painted near the children’s zoo. Dinner catered by Rudy’s Country Store and Bar-B-Q will served 6–8 p.m., and a "blackboard auction" will take place from 6- 9:15 p.m. Participants will get to write their bids for items on a piece of paper, and the winners will be written on a blackboard.
The special events center was being decorated to make people feel as though they were underwater, said Ciri Haugh, marketing coordinator.
"The building has this blue netting hanging down, kind of looks like they’re underwater," she said. "We’re hanging all these inflatable fish and sea creatures."
Haugh said there will also be a specialty margarita bar. The margaritas, she said, will be christened with such colorful names as the barracuda margarita (mango), sea urchin margarita (tamarindo), and possibly the Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle margarita. That’s the traditional lime margarita. The strawberry margarita will get to be the "red snapper" margarita for the night.
"The margaritas are named after sea animals, because our theme this year is ‘A Fiesta Under the Sea,’ " she said. "All the proceeds are going toward construction of the Russell Aquatic Ecology Center. It’s gonna be a lot of fun."
Money raised in last year’s Zoofari fundraiser also contributed to the construction of the center.
"It’s going to take quite a bit of money to build this center," Galvan said. "So they decided to dedicate this year’s proceeds again to the exhibit. There’s a long range planning committee and they look at different things and they’re the ones who kind of make the decisions."
Although the zoo already has an aquatic center, drought conditions have caused wear and tear on the facility. Therefore, says Pat Burchfield, zoo director, a new and much larger aquatic center is important.
"We’re postured just 20-some miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and many of our zoo visitors obviously end up going out to Padre Island," Burchfield said. "Many of them are recreational fisherman. They spend a lot of time on the jetties, and a lot of the things they catch they can’t identify. We just feel that being this close to a marine environment, and also our freshwater environments, that we ought to do a better job of showing people what’s found in our particular region."
Burchfield said the new center would include a mangrove exhibit, in reference to the mangroves growing on Padre Island. There will also be a Laguna Madre nursery exhibit.
"A lot of people don’t realize the lagunas are the actual breadbasket for the Gulf of Mexico," he said. "That’s where all the larval shrimp and a lot of the fish fry come from that migrate out into the Gulf of Mexico. They’re literally nurseries for a lot of species."
The highlight of the center, however, will be the "Stingray Encounter." Children of all ages will get to touch and even feed stingrays.
"Our regular Gulf stingray is not venomous, and if we just clip those barbs that removes any potential problem there," Burchfield said. "They grow back anyway if they do it properly."
For more information, call the Gladys Porter Zoo at 551-0406.
