Only Chance to See

Coming fresh off the news of the closure of the Delbridge Museum at the Great Plains Zoo...

The other day, I took a break from a non-zoo trip to Boston to visit one of my favorite places in the city, the stuffily-named Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.  The Museum is a fairly small, old-fashioned cabinet of curiosities compared to the fancier, glitzier natural history museums out there, which might be why its my favorite.  There isn't really room for fancy dioramas, but I swear, every inch of the space is stuffed with specimens, sometimes almost jumbled as a heap.

The back few rooms are home to an amazing assortment of taxidermized mammals, and it was there that I spent 90% of my all-too-brief visit.

I think what I love the most about these old galleries is that they provide me with the only chance I will likely have of seeing many of these animals in the flesh - even if the flesh isn't actually there, and the skins aren't moving.  Other guests may have been enraptured by the gaping maw of the hippo or the snarling visage of the tiger.  I was spellbound by the extremely rare animals which are not found in any zoos in the country, if not the world.

I was admiring a Sumatran rhino - itself a rhino I've only ever seen once in real life, and doubt I ever will again - when right next to it I was gobsmacked to see the fifth member of the rhino family, one that numbers in the double-digits in the wild and may very well be extinct in my lifetime, the Javan rhino.  Also on display were an indri - the world's largest lemur which has proven extremely difficult to keep alive in zoos -, the giant otter shrew (which I only know from reading Gerald Durrell's first book of animal collecting, The Overloaded Ark), and the quirky little marsupial anteater, the numbat (which, now that I've seen a platypus, is the Australian mammal that I'm most desperate to see in person). 

 And that, of course, doesn't count the extinct animals there, whether they be relatively recent losses (ivory-billed woodpecker, thylacine) or long gone (prehistoric reptiles and mammals).

Seeing wild animals in the wild has always been one of my biggest pleasures in life.  I've always loved zoos for giving me the chance to experience animals that I may not be able to see in the wild.  And, I've come to discover, I love natural history museums for giving me the chance to experience animals that I may not be able to see in the zoo.