Aviaries and Bird Houses

Almost every zoo and aquarium I've ever been to has an aviary.  Almost without exception - and those that haven't have all been facilities that either don't have any birds at all, or are primarily hoofstock facilities that might only have ostriches, emus, and other flightless birds.  In contrast, it's pretty infrequent these days that I go to a zoo and they have a bird house - and the ones that do have these exhibits, I get very excited about.

People tend to use aviary and bird house interchangeably, perhaps thinking that the former is just a fancier name for the later, but their is a difference.  An aviary refers to an enclosure that allows birds to engage in flight.  In zoos and aquariums, these are often mixed-species, and often large structures that allow visitors to walk through, among the birds.  A bird house is... well, a house with birds.  Sort of like a reptile house, or a small mammal house (another vanishing exhibit), it's a building that contains multiple exhibits for birds.  Many of which will likely be aviaries.

In recent years, more zoos have been closing their bird houses, and instead concentrating their bird collections in aviaries, again typically of the large, walk-through persuasion.  These are probably the most popular exhibits for birds (excluding penguins, which have their own exhibits and have star-power of their own that is unmatched by any other birds), and, to be fair, some of them are absolutely spectacular.  The series of massive aviaries at the San Diego Zoo, for example, or Wings of Asia at Zoo Miami, are some of the finest exhibits in the US, of birds or any other animals.

The problem is that, in most cases, the aviaries aren't nearly as extraordinary... and I find many of them kind of boring.  What's worse, I hold them to be partially responsible for the loss of bird species in zoos.

There are simply some bird species which "play nicer" than others, while also being reasonably easy to take care and attractive/amenable to being seen by the public, even in a large exhibit.  There's a regrettable lack of original thinking going around in many zoo leaders these days, to say nothing of serious risk aversion, which means that if a zoo is planning a big walk through aviary, they most often are going to draw from the same fairly limited cast of avian characters to stock it.  I can't even begin to recall how many times I've been to a zoo and seen the exact same species in very similar aviaries.  If you don't go to many zoos, I'm sure the experience is cool.  As for me... I sometimes feel my eyes roll every time I look at a pied imperial pigeon or a ringed teal, two of the classic aviary birds.

A bird house, on the other hand, interests me, mostly because you don't know what you're going to find.  There are some species which just don't fit in the big aviary model.  Maybe they're too small to easily manage in such a big space, or their care is too specialized and delicate.  Maybe their either too aggressive, or, conversely, too easily bullied and intimidated, and need to be kept separate.   For species like these, it's best to have a set up with lots of individual enclosures that allow keepers to provide more direct, personalized care.  Having lots of smaller exhibits also provides more flexibility with management.  Suppose, for example, your pair of birds has raised a clutch of young, and now they're kicking them out of the nest - aggressively.  If the birds are all in one big aviary, they might continue to chase and harass the youngsters.  In a bird house, you can just shift them to an exhibit next door, out of sight and out of mind of their parents.

Recently, I spent a wonderful day at the Bronx Zoo and, for the first time in all of my rushed visits there, really had the time to enjoy the World of Birds in peace and solitude.  Walking through the hallways, I felt like I was looking through a series of portals into different worlds - here a desert, there a jungle, here a boreal forest.  I enjoy sci-fi a lot, and the building definitely has a 1970's futuristic vibe to it, so at one point I imagined that I was looking out the open port of a spaceship into a new world, inhabited with unique, never before seen creatures.  Compared to your typical walk-through, I saw a greater number and diversity of species, and Bronx Zoo's breeding success with birds is extraordinary.

Some of these experiences could have perhaps been replicated in a walk-through aviary.  Many of them, I suspect, were unique to this management system.  For some species (and some visitor experiences), there's really nothing like a bird house.