If anyone was born to run a zoo it’s Dr. Patrick M. Burchfield, now in his 51st year with the Gladys Porter Zoo, as Brownsville’s wild gem celebrates its own half century of delighting and educating visitors.

Burchfield’s first trip to Brownsville was at the invitation of Warren D. Thomas, the zoo’s first director, to discuss Burchfield’s ideas for the new reptile house Thomas was designing. Burchfield at the time was head keeper of the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo’s new Reptilia-Amphibia Hall, but was asked to review Thomas’ blueprints by Gladys Portergeneral curator Tom Hoover, who’d been a fellow zookeeper with Burchfield in Columbus, Burchfield’s hometown.

“I said sure, send them on up,” Burchfield said. “I sent them back with fairly extensive changes recommended, and apparently Dr. Thomas got very mad.”

This was the same Warren Thomas who, as a second-year veterinary student at the Columbus Zoo, was featured in Life magazine for saving from stillbirth the world’s first captive-born gorilla, Colo, in 1956. Burchfield cared for the young western lowland gorilla at Columbus in the early 1960s. Colo was the world’s oldest gorilla in captivity when she died in 2017 at the age of 60.

The fame landed Thomas the job of first director of the Oklahoma City Zoo, which in Burchfield’s words “he took from a roadside menagerie to a major world zoo.” Now Thomas was helping design Brownsville’s new zoo and wanted the master plan to include a reptile exhibit, according to Burchfield. At any rate, Thomas bought Burchfield a plane ticket to Brownsville.

“He said I want you to come down here and take this building and make it work,” Burchfield said. “Realizing my boss (in Ohio) wasn’t going to go anywhere anytime soon, and this was an opportunity to build an entire program, I came in November of 1970.”

Gladys Porter opened a year later, on Nov. 3, 1971. It wasn’t long before Burchfield was promoted to general curator in charge of all the zoo’s animals, not just reptiles, though he definitely knew something about reptiles.

“When I started out as a volunteer at the Columbus Zoo in 1959, as a kid basically, I’d always been interested in reptiles and amphibians and caught them since I was a small boy and dragged them home much to my father’s chagrin,” he said.

Burchfield’s dad, with matinee-idol looks and expert marksmanship and archery skills, which he passed on to his son, was petrified of snakes.

“My mom was my accomplice and she supported me, so he had to,” Burchfield said. “Bless his heart, he put up with them.”

Despite his queasiness about snakes his father loved all animals, even reptiles, another quality he passed on to his son.

“He would buy a snapping turtle from some kids so they wouldn’t hurt it, or bring a bullfrog home, or three red fox kits, which we bottle raised, and ground hogs,” Burchfield said. “He was always saving animals, so we had wild animals in our house from the time I was a small child.”

Gladys Porter Zoo Director and herpetologist Dr. Patrick M. Burchfield stands at the zoo’s Tropical Americas & El Mundo Huasteco Totonaco exhibit as Burchfield recounts his 50 years of service at Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville. (Miguel Roberts/The Brownsville Herald)

Burchfield had graduated to a paid position as zookeeper in Columbus when Vietnam came along. He volunteered for the Marines but didn’t meet the Corps’ height requirement, so he joined the Army instead. It was 1964. His father had heard that the Army was doing something at Fort Knox involving snakes, so Burchfield hopped in his Volkswagen and headed to Kentucky to find out what it was all about.

At Fort Knox he met a Capt. Herschel Hardin Flowers, at the time the youngest graduate of the University of Florida’s veterinary school. By coincidence, Flowers had just been tasked with a USAID mission to build a snake venom antiserum production facility in Costa Rica.

“He said, ‘Your timing is impeccable. I need someone to run my snake lab and provide snake venom for the researchers. And also by the way you’ll be a guinea pig in our active immunization study,’ ” Burchfield said.

Burchfield was one of four GI’s who volunteered to be injected with neurotoxic venom from some of the world’s deadliest snakes. At the same time, he was extracting venom from snakes for the biochemists and pathologists who were developing vaccines for military personnel headedoff to Southeast Asia and the tropical Americas.

“It was really cutting-edge stuff back in the 1960s,” Burchfield said.

In partnership with the University of Costa Rica, the project was the genesis of the Clodomiro Picado Institute in San Jose, which today produces most of the snake venom antiserum for Central America, Costa Rica in particular. Flowers, acknowledging Burchfield’s skills in snake husbandry and management, charged him with improving conditions for the animals and boostingvenom production, which entailed trips to Costa Rica to teach technicians how to handle snakes and extract and process the venom.

Among the snakes with whom Burchfield became intimately acquainted was the fer-de-lance, or terciopelo, considered one of the world’s most dangerous vipers. He developed techniques for gentle handling of the program’s snakes to keep them alive and producing. Despite their muscularity, snakes are fine-boned and can be easily killed if mishandled, Burchfield said.

After serving three years and four months in the military he returned to the Columbus Zoo as head reptile keeper until the summons from Thomas. Burchfield was promoted from Gladys Porter general curator to deputy director in 1988 and became executive director in 2007. Today the zoo’s gorilla patriarch, Lamydoc, born in the wild in Cameroon in 1963, is closing in on world’s-oldest-gorilla-in-captivity status if he survives a few more years. And a more recent arrival shares the boss’s name: Burchfield, a male western lowland gorilla, was born in May 2019 to parents Margaret and Mbundi.

“One of Gladys’ family members bought the naming opportunity for one of our young male gorillas a couple of years back,” Burchfield said. “He named it after me, much to my surprise and pleasure. That’s pretty cool, having a gorilla named after you, and one that will outlive you hopefully.”

He considers himself one of the luckiest people on Earth because he’s always been able to do for a living the thing he enjoys most.

“People ask me are you planning on retiring, and I say I’ll retire when I feel that I can’t contribute and make a difference,” Burchfield said. “Hopefully I’ll be smart enough to see that before other people do. It’s still exciting every day. No two days are alike.”

Gladys Porter Zoo Director and herpetologist Dr. Patrick M. Burchfield works from his office as Burchfield recounts his 50 years of service at Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville. (Miguel Roberts/The Brownsville Herald)

Of course not everybody gets to grow up in a house full of wild animals and develop such a strong kinship with animals. Nowadays, even more important than zoos’ mission of breeding animals for eventual re-release into the wild is fostering such awareness by changing people’s lives — especially children’s lives, he said. Zoos over the decades have transformed from “consumers of animals” to producers of animals, and today serve as the only link to the natural world for the vast majority of children in urban settings, Burchfield said.

He blames his generation for doing a poor job instilling an appreciation for Earth’s wild creatures in young people, but believes the new generation is more enlightened. His job, and that of all zoos, aquariums and wildlife preserves, is to “recruit them to the cause” of preserving what’s left and even renewing destroyed habitat, Burchfield said.

“I can hand you a piece of paper with facts on gorillas or whatever animal,” he said. “That’s one level of awareness. You can turn on Discovery channel and you can see a cheetah chasing a gazelle. That’s another level of awareness. But when you go out in front here in the gorilla exhibit and you look the gorilla in the eye and it looks back, and you take a deep breath and you smell gorilla, that’s a level of awareness most people will never experience anywhere but in a zoo. And we don’t care about things that we’re not familiar with.”

The future looks good for Gladys Porter, with a keen understanding on the part of city leadership of the zoo’s role as tourism asset and economic engine, recently opened colobus monkey and river otter exhibits to show off and a lot more on the horizon, Burchfield said. A new master plan is being finalized that will include new exhibits for lions and African wild dog as well as major changes to several existing exhibits, he said.

“I’m just feeling very lucky to be here to see this new master plan for the next 50 years put in place and hopefully see several major projects get underway and under construction,” Burchfield said. “I saw the genesis and now I’m seeing the rebirth.”

[email protected]