Years ago, when I was fresh out of school, I worked in the reptile house of a large southern zoo. It was a big reptile house, with dozens of displays ranging in size from 20-gallons for small salamanders to the size of my apartment for crocodilians and monitors. Every single one was furnished and designed by the keepers themselves.
One day, I decided to redecorate an exhibit that I inherited, one that housed a group of frilled lizards from Australia. I spent most of the day working on it, arranging sand and rocks and branches, then put the lizards back in. Then I went home for the night. When I came back the next day, I got a surprise. The lizards were in a holding tank in the back. All of the rocks and branches were stacked outside of the exhibit tank. Every last grain of sand was swept out. All that remained inside was a sticky note from my curator. "Do it better this time," was all it said.
Let's not beat around the bush - this guy was a jerk, and there were probably better ways to communicate with and train a brand new keeper in their first real job. But I at least was able to start understanding his aesthetic. Looking back on it, my frilled lizard display, which I had been so proud of at the time, was pretty damn ugly, sloppy-looking, amateurish. As he explained later, he wanted exhibits to look so natural that, if you took a photo of the animal in it and showed it to an expert on that animal, they might believe it was taken in the wild.
So I tried again, and I eventually got the frilled lizard exhibit... presentable. I soon learned that it was easier to get a natural effect by starting with smaller exhibits, so I began working on the small tanks. First I redid the Philippine tree skinks. Then, I did the red mountain ratsnakes. In what I considered my greatest success, I did the fire salamanders - unlike the others, this wasn't a redo, but a brand new exhibit for a new species to the zoo. My first impulse was to go quirky - knowing the role of fire salamanders in European folklore and legend, I thought briefly about doing it as a witch's cottage. Common sense and practically returned, and I did it as the floor of a German forest.
The technique, I learned, was to trust in nature as the best architect. I looked at pictures of the animal in the wild and tried to recreate the effect. For some species, I was even able to use my own memories of seeing one in the wild and tried to recapture that instant of surprise of spotting the animal for the first time. For a greater plated lizard exhibit, I remembered the red clay of East Africa and searched until I found some. For fire salamanders, I remembered the images in books of a salamander tucked beneath a mossy fallen log, and I tried to recreate that. Nature abhors straight lines, so I softened the edges with live plants and pieces of deadfall. Towards the end, I got pretty decent at it.
Nowhere in the league of the companies that specialize in this, of course, like Peeling Productions, from Pennsylvania. When a zoo orders an exhibit from Peeling, it really looks as if someone flew down to the Amazon with a chainsaw, chopped out a 3' x 3' x 3' foot section of jungle, and transplanted it miraculously intact back to the states. Costs about as much if they did that, too.
I don't know if I ever made my boss proud, but at least he never dismantled one of my projects again as soon as my back was turned. And the animals seemed happy enough in them, and in the end, those were the critics that I was really trying to satisfy.
No comments:
Post a Comment