And also by the way you'll be a guinea pig in our active immunization study,' ' Burchfield said.īurchfield was one of four GI's who volunteered to be injected with neurotoxic venom from some of the world's deadliest snakes. I need someone to run my snake lab and provide snake venom for the researchers. By coincidence, Flowers had just been tasked with a USAID mission to build a snake venom antiserum production facility in Costa Rica. Herschel Hardin Flowers, at the time the youngest graduate of the University of Florida's veterinary school. 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.Īt Fort Knox he met a Capt. He volunteered for the Marines but didn't meet the Corps' height requirement, so he joined the Army instead. 'He was always saving animals, so we had wild animals in our house from the time I was a small child.'īurchfield had graduated to a paid position as zookeeper in Columbus when Vietnam came along. '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. 'Bless his heart, he put up with them.'ĭespite his queasiness about snakes his father loved all animals, even reptiles, another quality he passed on to his son. 'My mom was my accomplice and she supported me, so he had to,' Burchfield said. '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.īurchfield's dad, with matinee-idol looks and expert marksmanship and archery skills, which he passed on to his son, was petrified of snakes. 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. Gladys Porter opened a year later, on Nov. '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.'

'He said I want you to come down here and take this building and make it work,' Burchfield said.

At any rate, Thomas bought Burchfield a plane ticket to Brownsville. 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. Colo was the world's oldest gorilla in captivity when she died in 2017 at the age of 60.

Burchfield cared for the young western lowland gorilla at Columbus in the early 1960s. 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.

Gladys porter zoo dinosaur exhibit