Reporter's notebook: Virtual animals, real business

There are more animals at the city zoo than meet the naked eye, if you count the electronic cast of cartoon creatures drawing players at a steady pace the past few weeks.

Staff at the Hillcrest Park Zoo have seen a recent jump in individual visits and annual pass sales from patrons “looking at virtual animals instead of real ones,” Hillcrest Park Zoo staff told The News of the resurgence in past weeks of the altered-reality mobile gaming application Pokémon GO.

“There are quite a few Pokémon people. They do come in, and a lot of times they don’t even look at the animals, they’re walking around with their phones, that’s how you know who they are,” said assistant director Mark Yannotti. “We have steady customers that come out just for that.”

It’s not some kind of concerted revenue-generating effort between city officials and developers of the global gaming phenomenon, but it does align with one of the app’s intentions: to get people out. The result is that hot spots for locating and “capturing” the array of animated animals end up being in the city park, oftentimes within the zoo gates or just around them.

Robert Leal was out at the zoo Tuesday afternoon for just that purpose; he told The News there were a number of “piplups” that day in the zoo, penguin type creatures he said were ordinarily a little harder to come by.

Leal hasn’t bought an annual pass, but has happily paid the single-day adult admission fee for his visits thus far.

Zoo staff are not complaining: more people are paying to enter the grounds, drawing business they might not have seen in the cold days of winter. Plus, the tacit invitation to admire flesh-and-blood animals while seeking digital ones may well prove effective.

“Bring on the Pokémon people,” Yannotti added.

— Compiled by Staff Writer David Grieder