Global Wildlife Center’s population of exotic animals keeps growing!

FOLSOM — The caller from his daughter’s school suggested Ken Matherne have a talk with Maci about her making up stories.
Maci had told her grammar school teacher there were giraffes in her back yard.

Matherne, 49, founder of the Global Wildlife Center east of Hammond, had a bus pick up his daughter’s classmates and teacher so they could see for themselves.

Today, Maci, 16, prepares lunch for visitors who eat overlooking a corner of the 900-acre property her dad has been developing since she was a toddler. The refuge takes up 640 acres of the original 900, leaving 260 acres for development.

Matherne and wife Christina Cooper, the center’s education and development director, often dine with zebra and giraffe in view just beyond their swimming pool and a tall wire fence.

Kameel the giraffe is expecting again. Kameel, which means giraffe in Swahili, was the first giraffe born at Global Wildlife. She’s given birth six times.

A giraffe’s arrival in the world begins with a 6-foot drop.

“They come out so limp and limber,” Cooper said. “By the time their big old head and neck come out, it’s not that far a drop, but it’s not pretty to watch.”

Three years ago, Kameel went into labor while cadging food from a wagonload of tourists.

“You never know what you’re going to see here,” Cooper said. As Kameel’s baby began its drop, a child asked the tour guide, “What are those legs sticking out?”

Kameel is due in late August or early September.

Meanwhile, late spring and early summer have seen the arrival of some of the 350 animals born on the place each year. The refuge’s population of 4,000 exotic animals includes oryx, blackbuck, cape eland and Nilgai antelope, axis deer, bison, camel, fallow deer, llama, Sicilian donkeys, sika deer, Watusi cattle, kangaroo, European red deer, zebra, giraffe and Father David deer.

Birds include rhea, peacocks, East African crowned cranes, a hyacinth macaw named Edgar who hangs out in the gift shop and Peaches, an orange-winged Amazon parrot who sees tourists off on their wagon ride through the refuge.

Wildlife scientists were skeptical of Matherne’s experiment of keeping free range animals of so many different species inside a fenced compound.

“We said, ‘Thank you.’ And 17 years later, here we are,” Matherne said.

On the other hand, when Matherne first proposed a wildlife park for children, his idea was to collect native wildlife. Scientists at LSU, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suggested exotics.

Matherne’s father, Lee, bought the land in 1974. He died a year later at the age of 41.

Ken and his brother, Lee Matherne Jr., expanded the family’s oilfield service company. Ken started Global Resources Inc., with offices in Lafayette and the Middle East. Matherne retired in 1989 in his early 30s to become “chief baby sitter” of Global Wildlife. As president of Global’s advisory board, Matherne receives no salary.