Elephants welcome visitors to Ringling Bros.' winter home in Ellenton
They arrived late, and they arrived hungry.
Very early Friday, six Asian elephants who are part of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus were among the animals who migrated down from the frozen north to their new winter home at the Feld Entertainment Worldwide Headquarters in Ellenton.
They were supposed to arrive a day earlier, but the heavy snows in Michigan delayed their train.
As late as Thursday evening, Feld officials didn't know when the train would arrive. But it pulled up behind the Feld headquarters on U.S. 301 about 2 in the morning.
By 11 a.m., about 250 people, including media representatives and local dignitaries, gathered in the Feld parking lot to celebrate the animals' arrival.
"Welcome back to Manatee County," said county commissioner Larry Bustle. "We're proud of you and we wish you every success."
The Ringling Bros. circus has made its winter home in Tampa for about 20 years. It had wintered in Venice before that, and in Sarasota until about 50 years ago. Now that Feld has moved its headquarters to Ellenton, the circus animals and performers will spend each winter here, preparing for the new season's show.
Bustle and other politicians addressed the crowd Wednesday morning, and then the stars of the morning's festivities came marching in. Bonnie Feld, wife of CEO Kenneth Feld, rode the lead elephant.
For the next half-hour or so, the elephants lined up at a smorgasbord of fruits and vegetables -- carrots, apples, watermelons, bananas and the like -- slowly but steadily chowing down on brunch as the crowd watched and took pictures. They delicately picked up single apples in their trunks and tossed them into their mouths. Or they'd grab and swallow whole bunches of bananas. One elephant struggled with a watermelon before she finally dropped it on the ground and stepped on it to get through the rind. The long table that had been overflowing with food when the six female elephants stepped up to eat was virtually empty by the time they were led away.
Elephant experts and ringmaster David Shipman talked about the Asian elephants -- an endangered species -- as opposed to African elephants, and about their new home.
Each elephant eats about 150 to 300 pounds of food a day, Shipman said, and drinks about 1,000 gallons of water.
"They are our top priority," he said. "We spend about $6 million a year on feeding them."
The elephants and the other animals that came to town on Friday, including tigers, horses and donkeys, will live in outdoor enclosures.
Ellenton will be the permanent home of the circus. Performers and animals will pull into town right around this time every year, and get ready for the new show that opens in Tampa on New Year's Day.
Ringmaster Shipman compared returning to the Bradenton-Sarasota area to coming back to the circus' ancestral homeland.
"It definitely feels like home," he said. "It's an unbelievable feeling to be back. Ringling Brothers is a family, and this absolutely feels like home."
Marty Clear, features writer/columnist, can be reached at 941-708-7919. Follow twitter.com/martinclear.
This story was originally published November 22, 2014 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Elephants welcome visitors to Ringling Bros.' winter home in Ellenton ."