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Reservoir Hill

Druid Hill Park

February 14, 2013

22. Adults Only

Inside the Maryland Zoo’s chandeliered Mansion House, schmoozing among 90 couples in suits and cocktail dresses, Jane Scheffsky shares several chuckles with a laughing kookaburra, sitting on a volunteer’s arm. With a spot-on imitation of the bird’s crazy, Woody Woodpecker laugh, Scheffsky keeps prompting the bird into faster, louder chortling. “I lived in Australia [the kookaburra’s native country] for seven years,” smiles Scheffsky, the zoo’s assistant director of group sales, explaining the natural rapport with her new friend.

Nearby, a different woman misunderstands, momentarily, that a girlfriend was not referring to her husband when she was overheard commenting on another male guest’s pungent odor. “Oh, I wasn’t talking about Todd,” the friend apologizes. “I was talking about the porcupine.”

The couples are here, however, not just to meet a few animals over hors d’ oeuvres and Chardonnay, but for the sold-out Valentine’s Day lecture, Sounds of Sex.

Lindsay Jacks, a zoo animal keeper, delivers her presentation, the Sound of Love, with accompanying videos of mallards, macaques, and whooping cranes—who mate for life—and other species, in the caterwauling throes of copulation. She highlights a male mouse, standing on his hind legs, singing “like Barry White” to woo a female partner.

She notes kinkier behavior as well, such as a penguin stopping to gawk at two other penguins having sex in public, so to speak. She shows a clip of “panda porn,” which is actually used by zoo professionals to encourage the seemingly cuddly bears, who have a small window of fertility, to procreate.

Later, she notes female primates will, at times, consciously increase their volume of noise to “help” male partners ejaculate sooner rather than later.

“I think we have all been there ladies,” deadpans Jacks, originally from Alabama, in a sweet Southern drawl. “For me, it’s usually so I can watch The Walking Dead, and it’s coming on in 10 minutes.”