Wounded Warriors of the Zoo

A zoo is generally as strong as its ties to its community.  In situations in which a facility is struggling and in poor shape, perhaps even on the cusp of closure, what generally will determine its fate is how much support there is for it in its community.  In many cases, faltering zoos have turned around - sometimes leaping from mediocrity to excellence - when their community has rallied behind them and political capital has been invested to turn things around.

The flip side of that is that building community goodwill and connections isn't something that that you can easily do from scratch when you're already in a bad place.  You need to have those relationships in place, fostering positive connections.  And a community isn't just one nebulous entity - it's made up of all sorts of communities - some defined by ethnicity, some by religion, some by profession, or hobby, or shared life experience.

Among those is the military - active duty, veterans, and families.

I once worked in a small town zoo, and I noticed two things.  One, we had a higher than I'd expected military presence in our town.  There wasn't really a base or fort nearby, but a pretty sizable percentage of our community served in the armed forces, and veterans groups were common.  We also had, I will admit, a pretty crummy bald eagle exhibit.  As with many bald eagle exhibits, it looked worse than it really was.  Many visitors who see bald eagles in zoos complain about the inability of the birds to really fly in them - not realizing that you could take the birds to the middle of the open wilderness, let them go, and they still wouldn't fly (or, if they happened upon a cliff, would fly... once).  

An idea that I cooked up but which, pun intended, never took flight, was getting some of the local veterans groups together to help build a new eagle aviary.  This one, however, would lean in the physical limitations of our birds.  It would ideally serve as a living monument to our local military community, many of whom came back from Iraq or Afghanistan wounded, but still full of life - just like the eagles.  It would be a happy reminder of their community and fellowship whenever they visited the zoo, something that they could point out and share with their families and friends.  It would reframe how visitors saw our eagles - not as broken things, but as resilient creatures that had been knocked around, but were still strong.  And, I hoped, it would forge yet another link between us and the our audience.

My Wounded Warriors Bald Eagle Aviary never came to pass at that zoo.  There's no reason that it couldn't somewhere else, however.