Heidi Otway: Hi Keith, welcome to the Fluent in Floridian podcast. I'm so excited to have you as a guest today.

Keith Winsten: Well, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Heidi Otway: So let's dive in. I was looking at your bio and you've gone to Yale University, the University of Illinois, and you have all these degrees. But I want to go back to the beginning and kind of find out what brought you to Florida, and then I want to then shift into what made you decide you wanted to work in the world of zoology. So what brought you to Florida?

Keith Winsten: I'm going to take you back one, actually. I'm going to take you back to the root question first, if that's okay.

Heidi Otway: Yeah.

Keith Winsten: So I think it's more fun.

Heidi Otway: Okay.

Keith Winsten: So when I was six years old, my mother is French and I had two older sisters and she was sort of proper. And then when I was six years old, one of my older sister's best friends gave me a pair of garter snakes for my birthday, we think, to charm up my mother. So that's where my interest in snakes and nature, and all things creepy crawly really started, when I was a young child and got fascinated with that.

Heidi Otway: Okay, so your mom let you have snakes in the house?

Keith Winsten: She did. She was a really good mom despite her proper nature of who she was. So yeah, I had many snakes in the house. I had snakes escape in the house, I had snakes escape in her car. We had all this growing up, it made it sort of exciting. And what brought me to Florida was the job. This is my third job in the zoo. I came here in the position I am today. I've been here over 20 years. And as a new zoo director, I was really lucky because I didn't really know what kind of institution would fit my style and what I like to do in the world, and I just got lucky. I landed at a very entrepreneurial, independent institution that sort of let me work with this community, do some great things.

Heidi Otway: So how did you know, or how did you know this would be a good fit for your personality, your style, your expertise and experiences?

Keith Winsten: It did. It really did. So when I was looking for my first zoo director job, I was looking for any zoo director job. I had a friend here, had a reputation as an innovative zoo, but I was really just looking for a zoo director job. And if you look across, there's about 225 zoos and aquariums that are accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. It's sort of the good housekeeping seal of approval. And of that 225, there's only like 20 that are independent zoos that are not for profit, non-profit zoos that are not part of a city, state or any government.

So most zoos and aquariums are part of some governmental body or you have for-profits like a SeaWorld, and this little group of zoos that are completely independent, including this one. And I landed here and that was really good for my style because we like to do things that are a little out of the box, and it's hard to do that in a governmental body. So that was just luck, very entrepreneurial to zoo that for 30 plus years has existed purely on its own two feet. But I didn't know enough back then to know that would be a good fit for me.

Heidi Otway: Really? So how long have you been with the zoo at this point?

Keith Winsten: Over 20 years.

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Keith Winsten: Yeah.

Heidi Otway: Wow. So what are you most proud of? You talked about that innovative entrepreneurial, what was the zoo like when you got there? And then kind of tell me some of the things you did to get it to where it is today.

Keith Winsten: Well, we've built on... That entrepreneurial spirit was here. When I came here it was already like the first zoo to have kayaking through our Africa exhibit. A lot of that was there already. And the basic look and feel was here. We like to say when we talk about our guest experience brand, that we provide personal nature experiences in an authentic Florida setting. And that was here. Some of the things I'm really proud of here at the zoo is both sort of the quality of life we provide for our animals and our animal well-being. It's our top commitment and we really go out of the way to provide what I call authentic lives for animals and do exceptional work there, whether it's the hoof care we give giraffes or our primate exhibits that let them migrate through this whole section of the zoo. And that's internal.

That's about providing this quality of life for our animals. But then externally, we have really answered the call of this community. Whenever there's an environmental issue, they come to the zoo and we do answer the call. And we have many stories of doing that. And so we are an important part of this community. You had mentioned growing up in Miami and how you went to the Miami Zoo. People grow up here, they get married here. They built this zoo 30 plus years ago, 16,000 plus people helped build the zoo.

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Keith Winsten: And so we insert their lives in many, many ways, but one of the really important ways is when there's an environmental crisis, they come to us to help solve it.

Heidi Otway: Wow, that was interesting. Can you give me an example of that?

Keith Winsten: Sure. So we are on the Indian River Lagoon on the east coast of Florida, one of the most diverse estuaries in the country. And in 2016 we had had a series of algae blooms and fish kills, and the community got together, and Brevard County actually commissioned a study and a report and a plan to fix the lagoon, called Save our Indian River Lagoon. And on a hot steamy August night, the county commission voted to put on the ballot a half cent sales tax to support the plan. And the next day the phone started ringing off the hook for the zoo and people were calling us and saying, "You're going to get this passed, right? You're going to make sure we support this and we get it passed and we get the funding to save the lagoon." And that is the role we play in our community.

So we did help get it passed with a bunch of other nonprofits that focused on getting the word out and educating people, it passed like 62.5%. And we've been doing work on the lagoon ever since, actually restoring the habitats. But we were the first people that many people thought of when it came to actually passing legislation that would help the Indian River Lagoon. And that's just an example. On the flip side, we answer the call for all sorts of species all over Florida. Agencies come to us all the time and say, "Can you help?" And we help, and that's really uniquely us. So we consider ourselves a community resource. Sometime that community is Florida wide, but we answer the call when it comes to wildlife and wild places.

Heidi Otway: So how many zoos are there in the state of Florida?

Keith Winsten: I believe there are 14 accredited AZA zoos and aquarium. We're not talking about the roadside attractions, we're not talking about a bunch of sort of more fly-by-night private ones. We're talking about zoos that sort of meet that standard of quality. So we are a very rich state in terms of zoos and aquariums.

Heidi Otway: Yeah. And you talked a little bit about whole conservation and the environmental impacts that you all help address. Can you talk a little bit more about how you all serve as that conservation hub in Brevard County, and then how does that work permeate across the state of Florida?

Keith Winsten: Yeah. So we really are really strong in three things, and every zoo aquarium is different. We tend to focus more locally than other zoos and aquariums, but we really have three major sets of programs. So one set of program is, I've already mentioned our Restore Shores. Those are boots on the ground people restoring oyster reefs and clams. And we have two seagrass nurseries, and we do buffer planting. We're out in the lagoon restoring those ecosystem services. We work with tens of thousands of volunteers to pull this off. But we're actually out there doing the work in the lagoon, restoring these services. Things like clams and oysters. They're the natural filters of the lagoon.

So what we have, our Restore Shores team, we also answer the call for rare and Florida species. So the rarest breeding bird in North America is probably the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow. It was down to around 60 birds, and ourselves and just a few other organizations, we actually breed them and release them every year back into the wild in places. And so we've put, I think it's been a thousand chicks collectively, we've put back out into wild to restore that species. So Florida species, things that you might've never heard of, like Perdido Key beach mice or Florida beach mice, or Florida grasshopper sparrows.

Heidi Otway: Never heard of it.

Keith Winsten: Never heard of them, but they're part of our heritage. They are fluent in Floridian, they're only found here.

Heidi Otway: I love that.

Keith Winsten: And then the other big part of what we do is you need to practice caring in your community. And what we've seen is Floridians really do care about our wildlife. So we have a state-of-the-art sea turtle hospital here. When sea turtles are injured and they need really special treatment, they often come to us. We have actually a CT scan on site so we can do turtle work that most people can't do. We have a lot of specialized treatments. So we get dozens of adult turtles and hundreds of hatchlings every year that we nurse back to health and release. And that's about Floridians practicing caring. We just opened a Manatee Rehab facility that's just getting started. We also work with orphaned Florida black bears.

Heidi Otway: Aww.

Keith Winsten: We can raise them in a facility where they're completely isolated by people and they learn a healthy respect for people and they can go back to the wild. So those are our three main programs, restoring the habitat, breeding, and taking care of rare species, and then doing rehab work on species that we impact. We also do a lot of work in terms of sustainability practices and we support international work as well. But most just focus on the international, we are so lucky in Florida to have these amazing species here that we focus here.

Heidi Otway: So that's fascinating. I mean, as I'm listening to you talk, it sounds like this is not your traditional zoo where you go and you look at animals in cages, right?

Keith Winsten: Yeah.

Heidi Otway: So can you tell me what someone would experience if they were to come to your zoo?

Keith Winsten: So we're not a traditional zoo. And it was built by the people of this community, it was a very audacious thing to do. Because we live in Brevard County, sort of in the shadows of the theme parks, we're lucky, we get a much bigger group of tourists than traditional zoos. And they're willing to invest in us and have those experiences.

So our zoo is unique in a couple things. You can do all sorts of things you can't do at other zoos. You can zip line through the zoo, you can kayak through the zoo. It feels like you're in this lush, tropical habitat when you're here and the animals feel like they surround you and some of our exhibits, they're over you, they're below you, they're on top of you. The animals seem to have free rein, and we're the ones sort of constrained to the path.

So people often say it's so much more than a zoo. And you might know this, we often, for a small community and a relatively small zoo, we make a lot of top 10 lists because our experience is so unique. And we just make it feel like Florida. It doesn't try to feel like, sure, our African savanna is wide open and has great stature, but we're not using a lot of rock work or theming, we're making you feel immersed in the habitat. We also got really lucky, our initial design is that classic almost Disney design with a center loop and things off it. So you're never five minutes away from anything in our zoo, even though it feels spacious.

Heidi Otway: Now, you all are embarking on a new project there at the zoo. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Keith Winsten: Yeah. You can see over here if I... There you go. That's a picture. Over 10 years ago, we realized that there was this big vacuum on the east coast of Florida. We have major aquariums on the I75 corridor on the west coast, and major one just opened, or is about to. But on the coast of Florida, we have no major aquariums at all south of Charles, if you think about it.

Heidi Otway: I did not know that.

Keith Winsten: Yeah. So we started looking and our interest was peaked because one of the commercial aquarium companies, we realized, was actually looking in Port Canaveral, and we realized that that is the perfect place for an aquarium. It's near the I95 corridor, it's the 528 that takes people from the Orlando Airport to Cocoa Beach, it's right by the second-busiest cruise port in the world. And so we've been working on a project, we're working really hard to break ground this year on sort of a world-class aquarium, but also is, I'm going to use your Fluent in Floridian, it's not a big concrete box. It's a campus with lots of outdoor exhibits, so you're out in the sunshine and seeing the fish and other animals out in habitats that definitely feel Floridian.

Heidi Otway: Well, you know I have to ask, are you going to have sharks?

Keith Winsten: Of course. And some of the stars of our show are actually going to be bull sharks.

Heidi Otway: What?

Keith Winsten: So bull sharks actually use the Indian river Lagoon as a nursery.

Heidi Otway: I didn't know that.

Keith Winsten: And as great white sharks have the reputation, but bull sharks have the attitude. So there's very few aquariums that have bull sharks. They can be aggressive. But of course we also run a zoo, we're used to dealing with things like jaguars and lions, and we know how to safely handle animals that can be dangerous. And we feel like they're such an iconic species in our part of the world, so we'll have two giant outdoor shark exhibits, and one of them will really focus and feature bull sharks, which we're really excited about.

Heidi Otway: Oh my goodness.

Keith Winsten: Yeah. So then we'll have all the other, what we call sharks and friends. But you're not going to see sharks in a tunnel like you see elsewhere. You're going to see them out in a flat. You're going to feel like you're sharing the water with them, which is what we get to do every time you go fishing in the Indian River Lagoon.

Heidi Otway: Okay, no, no, no. You said I'm going to experience, you said being in the water with them. What does that mean?

Keith Winsten: You're going to feel like you're in the water with them. So you're looking up over the top of the water, you're looking underneath. You won't actually be in the water with the bull sharks.

Heidi Otway: Okay, never mind. I just wanted make sure. I just watched Jaws over the weekend, so I just wanted to make sure.

Keith Winsten: We watched Jaws again recently, what an incredible movie.

Heidi Otway: Yeah. 

Keith Winsten: But you know what's so interesting is that, there's a group called OCEARCH that just spoke here, they've been doing incredible work understanding the life cycle of great white Sharks and the time periods they spend time off our coast. So they're out there in the ocean right here, sort of cleaning up what needs to be cleaned up out there. But not people. You don't get shark bites from great Whites here in Florida. Other things nip you, but...

Heidi Otway: Yeah.

Keith Winsten: But yeah. But you will share water with our rays and with other things, and you'll get to get your feet wet at the aquarium.

Heidi Otway: So tell me more about some of the partnerships that you all have with the schools and the universities here in Florida, and some of that unique work that you all are doing in partnerships.

Keith Winsten: Sure. Partnerships are always based on mutual goals, and a partnership I'm really proud of here is with the Florida Institute of Technology. They now have an animal behavior major, and it started with two professors there who are experts on animal cognition. How do animals think?

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Keith Winsten: So they came out of labs working with pygmy chimps, Bonobos, and they started coming here many years ago and started working with our spider monkeys. Spider monkeys are one of the biggest monkeys in South America, and they actually live in the same kind of family group as gorillas, or people, or dolphins. And we call it fission fusion, where they have big family groups that sometimes they fuse together, think about Thanksgiving when your whole family comes to town. And then fission, how relieved you are where they all go home back to their own houses. And so we didn't know that much about spider monkey behavior, but when we redid that part of the zoo, the folks who run these cognition programs actually said, "We really should use this opportunity to keep them like they would in the wild."

So our Spider monkey troop, which has grown to 15 or 16 monkeys, has multiple places they can be connected with overhead tunnels. So you actually watch them migrate through. They have undergraduates and graduate students watching their behavior. We've learned so much about how they behave. And for example, we've had, over the years we've had monkeys that were confiscated at the Mexican-US border. People were smuggling baby monkeys in. They ended up coming to us. And what we learned was the group accepts these new monkeys, they get integrated into the group. People usually think of spider monkeys as sort of tough monkeys, but sort of incredibly open to having new members join. So that partnership's great because we've learned so much from these two researchers and they're teaching the next generation of animal behaviorists. So we're really happy to see that moving ahead.

Heidi Otway: Can we talk about the economics of your zoo and the contributions that you all make? I would say that you're part of our tourism industry, but then you're also part of education, you're also a business. So talk about the economics of the zoos in Florida, your zoon in particular, and how it impacts our economy here in Florida.

Keith Winsten: Well, first of all, you do have the big for-profit zoos, right? So you have SeaWorld and you have Busch Gardens, and you have Animal Kingdom. Obviously those are huge institutions. Most zoos don't run in the block. Most zoos are part of a governmental body, or barely. Aquariums are typically, there's much fewer of them and they are much more profitable. So one of the reasons we're opening a second campus in Aquarium is to really be an income source for all the programming that we do.

Heidi Otway: Oh, that's wonderful.

Keith Winsten: So for example, we've committed a dollar of every paid admittance to the aquarium to go to the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program. So we'll be generating like half a million dollars a year for that. So we're trying to use the economics of aquariums to balance out the zoo. Now we have to run in the black because we're not part of any governmental body, we always have to be entrepreneurial and keep that forward.

But it's expensive. The main expense in zoos is staff. You have a very high ratio of people working here, very dedicated people. People always think it's the animal food, that's not a lot of it. It's really the people that cost. And then the economics of when you have hundreds of thousands of people coming through your door, you need insurance, you need all these other things to take care of those folks.

Heidi Otway: Yeah.

Keith Winsten: So we are unusual in that. We feed ourselves, so we always have to be very entrepreneurial in what we do, and some of our events. We offer all sorts of special programs, but we also want to be reasonable. So for example, in September, kids come free to the zoo.

Heidi Otway: Oh.

Keith Winsten: Yeah. And during the first couple of weeks of December when the weather is perfect, but prior to the Christmas break, seniors are like $10. So we want to make sure the whole community is able to take advantage of us. And then we have these great memberships where you pay once and you come as much as you like during the year. So we offer something for everybody. And of course, we're always much less than the theme parks. You mentioned economics, one thing we've talked about here in Brevard County, obviously in Orlando area, you have the world's greatest critical mass of theme parks in the world. But we'd like to think here on the east coast, between the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, the zoo, and hopefully soon the aquarium, we're going to have a critical mass of what I'm going to call authentic theme parks. Places you can have just as much fun, but do real things with your family and learn about the real world and learn about science in a way that's very concrete, a lot of fun, but it's not all made up.

Heidi Otway: Yeah. I'd be curious to know about how you're bringing up the next generation of people like you that would keep this going.

Keith Winsten: So interestingly enough, 30 years ago or so, there was deep, deep concern among people like me about that next generation. There was a very influential book called Last Child in the Woods, about how we had taken a generation, we had separated them from nature, they weren't playing outside. People were wrongly thinking it was more dangerous to be a child. It's actually much safer now to be a child than 40, 50 years ago. So they wouldn't let kids play outside. Obviously they had TVs, and now they have these, and that we're going to have a whole generation separated from nature. And you do need to spend quality time outside to have the appreciation for what it is.

Where we are in Florida, I raised my kids here, has great outdoor values. People here are surfing, playing soccer, fishing, hunting. They're outdoors all the time. So we're naturally lucky here, let's say Chicago, where you have to be in for most in the winter. So we are really deeply concerned and we designed a lot of programs to get families outside and we told lots of horror stories of parents who were scared to literally step off the blacktop. I think one of the positives of COVID is families were home and they spent more time outside. I'm not as worried about the next generation. I'm worried about this. I'm worried about people's attention is focused here. But I think giving kids a chance, they love to be outside an experience nature.

And that is really critical. And you need adults in their lives who encourage that, right? To encourage that. And we are as a society, because of national media, and any bad thing happens in any part of the world, we all think it's happening here. So we do need to let our kids roam and ramble. We need to keep them safe, but we also need to let them have the adventures we have. And I don't know how you grew up, but I had the typical, in the summer, leave in the morning, come back at dinner, and run amuck. Right?

Heidi Otway: Yes, that's exactly [inaudible 00:22:03].

Keith Winsten: And learn how to keep yourself safe. As a child, learn how to climb a tree safely. So that next generation, I think the interest is always there. And we take almost every fourth grader out into the Indian River Lagoon, so they get to experience that. We work with VPK and Head Start programs here, trying to get folks out saying, "Here's all these wonderful things you can do in nature with your family."

Heidi Otway: Yeah, I love that. So in closing, earlier you said that you decided to love animals because you were able to get snakes in the house, right?

Keith Winsten: Yeah, absolutely. My favorite stuff.

Heidi Otway: Decades later, you're working at this beautiful facility, you're opening up all these experiences for people to experience all these different animals and experiences. So what is your favorite animal now and what is your favorite thing to do at your zoo?

Keith Winsten: I'm going to mention two animals. My favorite animal for a long time was this giant black-throated monitor. So giant lizard, like four feet long that lived in our petting zoo.

Heidi Otway: Oh my goodness.

Keith Winsten: And this lizard really liked to be around people.

Heidi Otway: What was his name?

Keith Winsten: It was Ollie. And would tolerate small children sitting on its back. And if you think about this, in hindsight, Ollie was one of a kind. I mean, this is an animal that is capable of certainly giving you a painful bite and you have to manage that they don't carry bacteria. But I have pictures of little kids like falling asleep on Ollie's back. They felt so at home with this giant lizard.

Heidi Otway: Oh my goodness.

Keith Winsten: It's kind of amazing. My favorite animal today, and I didn't have one until a few years ago, but there is a kind of forest giraffe. It was one of the last sort of large animals sort of documented by western science in Africa. Of course, the people lived in Africa knew about it for thousands of years, but it's called Okapi. And it's got almost a velveteen brown coat. And it lives in really the deep dark forest, and they're just stunning. And we have an Okapi here whose name is George, who was named after one of my mentors. And I'm just in love with Okapi. I just think they're beautiful and people see it, they go, "What is that thing?" It just looks like it was put together by committee.

Heidi Otway: Really?

Keith Winsten: They're beautiful. And they used to be very rare at zoos. And when my mentor, this guy, George Ram, when he showed up at his first zoo, the first day he showed up, the first Okapi showed up at a zoo in America, and he tells the story they didn't even know he started for weeks because they were so fascinated with the Okapi, and he became a champion for Okapi. So I'm proud that our zoo has them here. And normally I go for the reptiles and other things, but George the Okapi is one of my favorites. He's just beautiful.

Heidi Otway: Wow. Well, Keith, thank you so much for being on the Fluent in Floridian podcast. I am going to make sure that when I come to Central Florida, I'm bringing my family to yours.

Keith Winsten: Please come see us, I think you'll really enjoy it.

Heidi Otway: I think I'm going to wait until December though when it's cooler.

Keith Winsten: Oh, wait until it's cooler. It's hot right now. We're really nice in the morning. By the afternoon it gets hot, but Sundays in the summer, we have Science Sundays indoors, and you can still explore in the nice air-conditioned thing. So we appreciate [inaudible 00:25:17]

Heidi Otway:...Overnight? Do people have overnight adventures at the zoo?

Keith Winsten: We do sometimes. We have in the past. We do some overnights. The other thing I'll just tell you in closing is one of our advantages in central Florida is we really are a half day experience. You don't need a full day, you don't need to invest that much time. You don't need to invest that much dollars. You can comfortably come for a morning and see us all and feel really good about it and want to come back for more.

Heidi Otway: All right. I'm putting that on my calendar. Thank you. 

Keith Winsten: There you go. We look forward to seeing you.

Heidi Otway: All right. Thank you so much.

Keith Winsten: All right. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Heidi Otway: All right.