endangered species, a black-footed ferret duplicated from the genes of an animal that died over 30 years ago. endangered species, at 48-days old on Jan. Fish and Wildlife Service is Elizabeth Ann, the first cloned black-footed ferret and first-ever cloned U.S. For more than three decades, people have been welcome to drive in, park and wander during daylight hours.In this photo provided by the U.S. The place has always been open, except for a few days in the late ’90s when a visitor tossed a cigarette butt at the flower fountain and caused a fire at the house that Swets had turned into a castle for Sandy. “We’ve had a year-and-a-half honeymoon,” he says.īut breaking up with the Swetsville Zoo won’t be easy.
Another eighty are already ensconced in his trailer park near Brownsville, Texas, where he met his new companion, Diane Tribble, whose husband died several years ago. Timnath bought some statues a decade ago, when he first considered closing the place. He’s had plenty of interest in them, but he wants to keep this collection together. What Swets doesn’t know is what will happen to the creatures in the Swetsville Zoo. Developers are reportedly interested in building a hotel here, by the banks of the river. Traffic zips by along Harmony Road, which was just dirt when Swets was a boy. Indeed, what was once a rural retreat is increasingly urban. He sold off the land where that giant Costco was built next door five years ago.
He even has a locked garage full of classic cars.Īnthony Camera He knows he’ll have no trouble selling the acreage.
Other fantasy vehicles, like the Autosaurus II, still come out occasionally for parades. “We had a 51-and-a-half-year honeymoon,” Swets says. By the time Sandy passed away a dozen years later, they’d put 50,000 miles on that trailer. He outfitted a special trailer, “Dream Machine,” so that he and his wife, Sandy, could travel their first trip was to the Mayo Clinic in 1996, seeking help for repercussions of her back surgery decades before. Using pieces of old farm machinery and auto parts and other random items, Swets created everything from a ten-seat bicycle to giant dinosaurs (lots of dinosaurs) to rockets to a vase filled with flowers and covered with hubcaps that spin. Today what remains of the Swets family farm - 36 acres just south of Harmony Road, a few minutes east of Interstate 25, right along the Poudre River - houses 180 sculptures made by Swets, many of them massive creatures that dwarf his first creation, others marvels of movement, all of them miracles of ingenuity. That was the start of the metal menagerie that became the Swetsville Zoo, an amazing roadside attraction that Swets opened soon after he started putting all of those sleepless nights to use. The result was “Buzzard George,” a bird with a shovel beak and a bicycle-frame body that stands just under three feet tall. Now he had a family of his own, and though a dairy had been sold off years before, he still had the rest of the farm to run.Īt 3 a.m., his mind spinning, Swets went into the barn he’d turned into a workshop and started welding together scrap metal. A member of the Timnath volunteer fire department, he’d just returned from a horrific call, helping out at yet another accident scene that involved someone he knew from the rural area around southern Fort Collins, where his parents had bought a 120-acre farm in 1942, when Swets was just a baby. One night back in 1985, Bill Swets was having trouble sleeping.