When you visit the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, DC, you are visiting one of the finest and oldest zoological parks in North America. Granted, not in the top 10 oldest, but totally in the top 10%. It's an institution with an A-List designer at its inception. Frederick Law Olmsted (who designed both Central Park AND the art of Park Design) was commissioned to do the initial design adjacent to the larger Rock Creek Park in 1889. While many, many upgrades have occured over the 130 years since, the same sense of organic balance and primacy of the natural world that are the hallmarks of all of his work remains present. Chief among these is the main thoroughfare between the bottom of the zoo at Rock Creek and the top at Connecticut Avenue, NW. Many guest no doubt spend their time traversing this steep incline and by the shear scope of exhibits presented there, never make their way at bottom past the Farm around to the American Trail. It's a pity, because between the two sits an amazing component of the zoo called Amazonia.
Amazonia is a building that houses a multi-storied Amazonian Rainforest with an aquarium lab featuring a host of lesser included species, a separate area dedicated to Amphibians with an emphasis on Poison Dart Frogs, a Coral Reef Lab with aquariums featuring coral species, and other meeting rooms and research labs. Top to bottom, it is an amazing place.
When you enter, the first thing you encounter is pool with fish and river rays. It is also home to bird species. The trees and flora that start out in this space rise up to join the vegetation on the upper level. This gives you the sense of observing nature in the Amazon from the vantage point of a minor palisade along the bank of a quite tributary.
The first view from the entrance.
A fish-eye view.
The above water habitat.
Looking down at the same habitat from the upper level.
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