Building a Desert

At my zoo, we called it the Great Bison Desert.  The city maintenance department had been supposed to drop off several truckloads of dirt for the exhibit.  Instead, through a bureaucratic screwup, the brought sand.  The curator at the time was too much of a chicken to tell them they screwed up, but hey, she wasn't the one who had to take care of the exhibit (or live in it), was she?  So instead, we'd plod through the shifting sand every day, looking for bison patties and cursing her under our breath, making jokes about swapping the bison out for camels.  

Within a week of the curator leaving, we were on the phone with the city requesting dirt for that exhibit.

It still wasn't the Great Plains, but it was a better environment for the animals than our pseudo-Sahara.

You'd think a desert would be an easy exhibit to replicate in a zoo.  Its dry and its open and there are limited plants.  If that's your sole definition of it, then yes, it's pretty easy.  A lot of old-style zoo hoofstock yards look kinda deserty.  A lot of exhibits in reptile houses are sand and rock with a backdrop mural of cacti.  

In reality, a lot of animals in the wild don't live out in the open desert that you might think of from Hollywood, with sand dunes and a few cacti and bleached cattle skulls grinning up at you under a blazing sun.  Sure, some do, especially those that are very adapted to going long times without water, such as Arabian oryx.  Most live in areas that might look more like very dry grasslands, or around oases or other small bodies of water.  

A challenge that a lot of zoos have with creating desert habitats is the vista.  Deserts tend to be open, wide places - but if you leave a zoo exhibit open and wide, a) visitors are either looking at buildings, roads, and other structures and b) the animals are being looked at from all sides.  Such exhibits may also look a little featureless and boring.  So, many zoos decide to make their deserts quite rocky, with fake-rock disguised buildings and walls surrounding the enclosure.  (A lot of zoo exhibits, to be fair, are built in this mold.  When I visited Africa for the first time, I remember being amused by the lack of giant rock outcrops every fifty yards, often forming suspiciously straight lines.

Size isn't everything in most categories, but the best (and by that I mean most convincing) desert exhibits I've seen have been the biggest ones - the coyote and peccary exhibits at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, the bighorn exhibits at Living Desert and Phoenix Zoo, the California condor aviary at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.  These exhibits are all big, well-vegetated, have decent terrain, and have minimal barriers.  That they all feature native species in native habitats doesn't hurt.

Deserts have a special kind of beauty, as do all ecosystems.  It's a kind of beauty, however, that can be difficult to translate to a zoo exhibit, especially when lots of space is not readily available.  For those facilities that have been able to pull it off, however, the results can be spectacular.