Ross Taylor

“Zookeeper” is surely one of the top twenty coolest jobs in the world, and for Ross Taylor, a South Minneapolis native and University of Minnesota graduate, the path to this career started, oddly enough, in clown college. Studying to be a circus clown led to a job as big-top animal caretaker and then, for the past twenty-five years, keeper at the Minnesota Zoo. Taylor is one of the folks responsible for the animals on the Northern Trail—that’d be buffalo, Przewalski’s horses, moose, and of course the endangered Amur (Siberian) tigers. Lately he’s been especially busy with some new arrivals—a pair of female tiger cubs born in May. Visitors have been able to watch the cubs in their den via closed-circuit TV, but starting September 18, the youngsters will be on view romping around the main tiger enclosure. When we enlisted Taylor for our desert-island game, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that, unique among all our previous interviewees, he’s actually been stranded on a real desert island: specifically, Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands, during his two years with the Peace Corps in the 1960s. “The minimum temperature the whole time was seventy-one degrees,” he says. Here’s what Taylor would take along for another stint in the South Pacific:

1) “A machete, because you can’t drink one of those big coconuts without them. You can use it for building huts, or just about anything you can think of.”

2) “A refrigerator. Boy, do you miss ice when you don’t have it for two years. Solar-powered, and stocked with supplies to make the perfect Hawaiian Sunset—rum, a
little pineapple juice.”

3) “Several blank canvases and painting supplies for capturing the island sunsets. I mostly paint with acrylics, because they’re so easy to handle. Recently, I’ve been painting animal-related portraits—tigers, actually.”

4) “A jar of mayonnaise, for when a palm tree falls down and you cut out the heart for a heart-of-palm salad. If you haven’t had salad for a year, it’s pretty much beyond description.”

5) “Two cats, to keep the rodent population down, which is a problem on a desert isle. Two cats because you can amuse yourself watching their interactions.” But Taylor would probably leave the tiger cubs at home—referring to the book The Life of Pi, he notes that on a desert island it’s probably best not to live next to a predator that weighs three times as much as you do. “I’d stick with domestic cats,” he says.