Nocturnal animals are, you know, some of the most interesting animals in the whole world. And nobody does, hardly anybody does nocturnal exhibits and animals well. the Grzimek House of Darkness in Frankfurt, you know, was kind of the leading nocturnal exhibit anywhere, but their doctor, Dr. Professor Grzimek had… Read More
I hadn’t the idea of doing Nocturnals. The interesting thing was that, you know, when I said we’d like to do a desert, you know, the board chairman and whatever said, hey, that’s neat. I liked deserts. And lots of people have been to Tucson or Phoenix and played golf… Read More
The nocturnal exhibit is if you do a, an exit survey, particularly of kids of the, of the, you know, of the number one top thing that we’ve done, the kids particularly will overwhelmingly tell you the nocturnal and particularly the swamp. And we got three quarters of an acre… Read More
I mean, that was kind of the way, cause everybody answered Gene’s phone calls. Cause he’d been a state Senator for about 14, 15 years and head a game and parks. And anyway, bottom line, and we had, we had a, a donation for the desert dome from a single… Read More
And I’ll call you back call. Read More
What’s its outstanding features?… Read More
Why did you choose this exhibit over, let’s say more popular animals?… Read More
Well, a couple of things. And again, it comes back to personal experiences as far as doing a nocturnal exhibit. Some of the, some of the most interesting experiences that I’ve had, you know, and we’ve had in all of the is, is bumping around in a, in a rain… Read More
And so you say, okay. And so I really liked to take all the credit for that, but I can’t because it was her idea. You opened up– Part of the idea that was mine though in the Garden of the Senses were the sculpture, because, you know, early on,… Read More
They’re absolutely. They, they belong to the, they blogged Kaiser Wilhelm. And after, you know, after Germany fell, why they moved them to the zoo. And so that’s one of the things, you know, we’ve got about 40 bronzes now and are working on more. You opened the Eugene Mahoney. Read More
Who was Eugene?… Read More
What was his significant at the Omaha Zoo?… Read More
And what did you hope to accomplish?… Read More
It was kind of one of those things where we had the, we had an old barn down there and we had an old area that had been part of the old park. And it was, it was kind of one of those things where it was, it was the… Read More
But we didn’t, you know if you’d asked me 50 years ago, if we’d ever hired a horticulturist, I said, you know, whatever. No, but, but, but actually, you know, horticulture should be one of the first people that you hire because that makes, you know, that makes the whole… Read More
So you need a geodesic dome. And it needs to be really high. The reason we’ve got a hemisphere and not, there’s a couple of other smaller, smaller ones that are only like a one-third where they come like this, but then the roof never gets high enough that you… Read More
You can’t do shading in a desert. Well, we did do shading actually. There’s a big center portion of that that’s, that’s 50% shade and then 40% and 30%, 10%. So that in December, January, February, when the sun’s coming through, it comes through clear acrylic. In the, in June,… Read More
That hot air bubble in the desert dome gets to be 140, 150 degrees at the top. And we just blow it off. And the idea was to do a big enough hemisphere that it got, you know, that you looked up once and said, wow. And then you’ve concentrated… Read More
Why was the exhibit important?… Read More
You know, you spread out a bed of sand and plant tomato seeds and wet it down and put a plastic cover over. If the tomato seeds sprout and grow good, well, that’s good sand. But we also send it to the lab. We finally found a quarry that didn’t… Read More