In your master plan, did the Living Desert start to shift in approach to conservation, or was it always part of what you were doing when you talked about the breeding and management of endangered species?… Read More
It was always part. I mean, even when, initially we didn’t have anything besides plants on the ground. I mean, in my mind there were the endangered species part would eventually come. Read More
Completely. Yeah. Were people starting to call Living Desert a zoo or was this a word that you- Not yet. No, and we didn’t call it a zoo. We called it Living Desert. We started out Living Desert Reserve. Then I lopped the word reserve off because I said it… Read More
People still refer to it as the Reserve and so forth, but the bottom line is we just became the Living Desert. We weren’t the Living Desert Zoo. We were just the Living Desert for a very, very long time before because again, there was some sort of, in some… Read More
And so, we need to do this. We were also a member of the AABGA, the American Association of Botanical Gardens. And I said, “No, we have to be.” And I was a great believer in professional memberships and these kinds of organizations, because we were so far in the… Read More
Actually, was that I knew it was a gal and she loved the desert as much as I did, although she was a art history major from Stanford and a mother of three daughters. Her husband had passed away. She was young, but she loved the desert, she loved being… Read More
So, I said to her one day, “I need a curator of education at Living Desert, somebody to help me explain the desert to people and develop a program for kids and adults and everything else, would you like to do that?” And she thought it would be great fun… Read More
But whatever she thought she would be good and useful as a mother herself and trying to teach her own daughter, she just brought all of that to the table. And so, I got really lucky and I just turned her loose and she was there for 25 years building… Read More
She was successful in getting the community engaged?… Read More
He would tell his colleagues, “You know what I used to do?… Read More
At night when nobody was around, we’d bring stuff from Living Desert.” (laughs) And we had more fun, but he was a great resource for us and other human doctors would occasionally look at things for us and local vets. And when Kevin would need a day off, we’d have… Read More
What kind of vision or programs were you charging this first person to develop and were you looking to target children or any audience, or what was that initial push that you wanted?… Read More
You gotta be happy about it,” or did you build it and then when the vet you hired, you said, “This is what part of your job is while you’re down here?… Read More
of your job. Yep. Yeah, we did not have a full-time staff that until we built the hospital. And so when we were searching for a vet, we said to him, “We’re gonna give you one of the most beautiful hospitals that you can imagine.” I mean, it had every… Read More
Do you have a medical, professional people, medical team, that you involve in things that go on at the zoo or is it mostly the veterinary staff?… Read More
If he needs assistance from either other vets, and we also for awhile, but he’s just, he passed away recently, we had a Eisenhower Medical Center is a big human medical center in our area, and there was a Dr. Lawrence, Lawrence Cohn, who was a physician who specialized in… Read More
He was just doing his job. And sometimes the tech would even be too busy, and the public could get that, but we always kept, it was one of my volunteer stations to get volunteers. So, there was always a volunteer in the hospital because they would take people around… Read More
“What’s he workin’ on today?… Read More
I wanna bring my friends over and see this. What’s he workin’ on today?” And it was a question we’d answer at the desk when people would drive over because he was workin’ on, they wanted to know what time he was workin’ on it and what it was gonna… Read More
But we try to, most of it still is birds. That’s the biggest thing, and so those mostly now go to the Raptor Center. We used to try not to accept big mammals. We live in a fairly varied habitat and we’ve even had people bring us live wild deer… Read More