The next room features both ducks and songbirds that might be found in both coastal and interior wetlands. This would be my third visit since the new Bird House opened, and I must say there were more species this time than I've seen before. Again, the birds are completely free to fly anywhere within the space that includes two different water features, both with shorelines and plenty of live native vegetation.
Sometimes the quality of one or both of these can determine my impression of the entire facility.
I love them because they are animal experience dense. And when done well, both the visitor and the residents have wonderful experiences. Of Course, a shitty version of either is pure hell. Animals kept in cages... unacceptable. Birds arrived at the National Zoo as early as 1900. They were displayed in dispersed cages at first, and then those were clustered into a bird focused area.
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| The 1928 entrance is preserved in the lobby. |
The Bird House, as the National Zoo in Washington, DC calls it, was first opened in 1928. It was the height of the money rich, "roaring" 1920's! The design and details were magnificent, and the birds were kept in spaces that allowed for maximum movement at the time. Over the years up-grades happened and when I first visited it in the late 1990's, it was a passable, if dated Aviary.
What I couldn't see was how the bones were wearing thin. The infrastructure was in need of a major upgrade, and in for a penny, in for a pound seemed a reasonable approach, versus the all too familiar "band Aide" option. So in 2017, the Bird House closed.
The new design was intended to occupy the original foot print, incorporate as much of the original, architecturally brilliant and historically significant building as possible, while also making across the board state-of-the-art upgrades based on a Gold Standard LEED rating. Price tag? $69,000,000.00! The most expensive and ambitious project ever undertaken at the zoo. Though I grant that factoring in inflation, this is an arguable statement.
Enter the fuck-fest that was the Covid pandemic, and timelines are screwed. But even this came to it's fruition in 2023. The new design, full of features that create a sense of flight, is dedicated to the migration of birds across the Western Hemisphere.
3) The South American Nexus of annual migration, the Brazilian highland Coffee Plantation. This fills the historic heart of the original Bird House, and focuses on species of song birds with long-range migration routes.
It is so easy to completely lose one's self in the magic of these environments, that I have to divide this record of my visit into three parts. So we commence our visit with the Delaware Shore!
