Roger Tory Peterson, the famous ornithologist and author of so many bird guides that taught many of us everything we ever wanted to know about telling bird A from bird B had, been there. And Roger brought back the first photographs ever of the James flamlingo that were worth having. Read More
What was his real status?… Read More
Then it would fly back in to the same perches and call again. It would go to perch one, perch two, perch three in two or three different trees. Having seen that, I was able to mark the trajectory of its flight with some little poles I put in the… Read More
It flew into the net, we lowered the net, put it in our caring box and took it back and Will Beebe finally got to see a bearded Bellbird close up. That was followed by quite a lot of interest to the New York Times, which brought a lot of… Read More
So I said, “Okay.” And I went down and collecting the bird was a fascinating experience. It took me more than a week of watching constantly the tree tops where the birds were calling to even see them. It’s a pigeon sized bird and it would disappear in the leaves… Read More
Can you describe the hardships?… Read More
When I became a curator at the Bronx Zoo, it was not unexpected for the curator to go in the field, although I guess not very many did to get particular animals for a particular purpose. Those were early days, the late ’50s, early ’60s, and we were interested, I… Read More
The World of Birds succeeded the old 19 three bird house on Astor Court at the Bronx Zoo. So it was made the old building was maintained until the World of Birds open. So getting birds for the World of Birds was primarily a matter of transferring birds from one… Read More
How did you make it happen?… Read More
On another exhibit, we had talked about collecting a little, but how difficult was it to collect birds for the World of Birds exhibit?… Read More
Did they come from the wild?… Read More
Did this exhibit have a conservation conclusion that you have tried to do then in future buildings that you did, or was this a little earlier in that development?… Read More
This was earlier, and the effort here was really to interpret for the visitor the behavior of animals who earn their living at night, because it was so little known. And that in itself, I think helps to build a constituency, excitement, which you can turn into conservation, but every… Read More
Are there still animals physically in it?… Read More
I don’t know. But it’s an interesting situation because it opened up to the visitor, a whole part of the animal’s world with which they were otherwise unfamiliar. Read More
When the building opened, we had lines of people, six people wide extending for 1/2 a mile. The first day it opened, we had 62,000 people that one day, and it remained an extremely popular building. It was not without problems in my opinion. Because it was dark, we had… Read More
But the building worked very well indeed. And the building is closed now, you know that. When the zoo, this happened, I guess last year or a year before, the zoo close many exhibits because of cutbacks in its budget. And so they closed that building. They wanted to close… Read More
Almost a majority, perhaps a majority of mammals are nocturnal. Most mammals see the world in shades of gray. The World of Darkness at the Bronx Zoo came about as the vision of the mammal curator, in those days, Joseph Davis. And Joe felt that he could exhibit colorblind animals… Read More
And he changed all the lights to red in one nocturnal section and put them on a reverse light cycle, making them bright white light at night. The building was so successful and so popular that the World of Darkness as a concept came about and Joe Davis led its… Read More
Easy, difficult?… Read More