The
Great Plains Zoo and Delbridge Museum of Natural History
When I arrived as the new executive director at the Great
Plains Zoo in
the spring of 1988, the first animal I encountered was the most impressive bull
elephant I had ever seen. He had long curved tusks, his ears were fanned out in
alarm, and his trunk reached out to smell whatever came his way. He was almost
life-like -- almost. Unfortunately, this elephant was a mounted specimen in the zoo’s Delbridge Museum
of Natural History, a facet of the zoo that I initially found distasteful. The
museum had over a hundred animals that had been shot by a local big game hunter
and placed in his hardware store in the 1960’s and 70’s. Upon the hunter's death, the
collection was purchased by philanthropist, C. J. Delbridge and donated to the
citizens of Sioux Falls on the condition that a museum be built to house them.
The City decided to build the museum at the zoo. Fortunately, the specimens had
been mounted by some of the best taxidermists in the nation, and were in
lifelike poses of museum quality.
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| Delbridge Museum of Natural History |
Managing the museum was the most memorable aspect of
my time in Sioux Falls. When I arrive there, the specimens were randomly
arranged as individual artifacts in a large, open indoor space. There was great
potential to turn it into an educational facility if we could place them in
naturalistic, diorama groupings. I enlisted the aid of a local exhibit
specialist and, we traveled to Los Angeles in October of 1990 to consult with
the Los
Angeles Museum of Natural History.
There we learned how to make molds out of silicon, latex, and plaster. We found
out where to purchase artificial rocks and plants and we observed the latest
advances in animatronic exhibits and robotics. The first exhibit we developed
in our own museum was an African waterhole, complete with artificial water,
simulated animal footprints, and, of course, our own mounted animals. In the
process of developing dioramas, my research uncovered one of the most
fascinating characters I have ever come across.
Carl Akeley
Carl
Akeley had been
part of a zoological collecting expedition to British Somaliland (Somalia) in
1896 for the Field Museum in Chicago. It was there that he became somewhat of a
legend in Africa when he killed a leopard – with his bare hands! According to
his account, he was walking through the bush when “I wheeled to face the
leopard in midair. The rifle was knocked flying and in its place was eighty
pounds of frantic cat. Her intention was to sink her teeth into my throat and,
with this grip and with her forepaws, to hang on to me while with her hind
claws she dug out my abdomen; for this pleasant practice is the way of
leopards”.
Fortunately for Akeley, she missed his throat and
struck him high in the chest, catching his upper arm in her mouth. He managed
to grab her by the throat, stuff the other hand in her mouth, and fall on top
of her. After an epic struggle, Akeley succeeded in strangling the leopard.
Akeley’s real claim to fame, however, was in the
world of taxidermy. His museum dioramas (which can still be seen today) were
astonishingly realistic. When he entered the profession and observed the
techniques of the time, he saw a better way to mount animals than those
commonly in use at the time. He was put off by the “upholsterer’s” method in
which a skin was sewn up, like a pillow, and stuffed with straw or excelsior
until it would hold no more, then “artistically” pulled in with thread here and
there to create contour.
His method was to take extensive measurements of the
animal, often making plaster casts of the animal’s face and other parts of the
body. Akeley then used modeling clay to sculpt the anatomically perfect,
skinless body of the animal. The model was covered with plaster to make a two-sided, removable mold which was used as a
cast for the paper mâche mannequin. Akeley would stretch the skin over the mannequin, working wrinkles and
veins into the skin. When the process was completed, he would touch up the skin
with paint and brush it. Akeley’s animal mounts were, and still are, uncannily
lifelike. His method, with only slight variations (the use of fiberglass
instead of paper mâche) is still in use today.
Akeley’s artistic eye also extended to the rest of
the diorama. He photographed scenes in nature and gathered samples of bushes,
plants, and other natural materials. He used these back in the studio, where he
made plaster casts and reproduced some of the artifacts in wax.
Museums and Zoos
One of Akeley’s pioneering achievements is still a
prominent exhibit at the American Museum of Natural
History in the
heart of New York City. At the center of the Akeley Hall of African Mammals is a freestanding group of eight
elephants surrounded by twenty eight habitat dioramas. One of these dioramas depicts
a family group of mountain gorillas in a scene that Akeley so meticulously
created that a member of the museum’s exhibits department was able to find the
location 90 years later, in 2011. Akeley had visited the Virunga Mountains of
central Africa in 1921, collecting animals and plants while taking photographs
and painting background studies. Though construction of the hall was completed
in 1936, the dioramas would gradually open between the mid-1920s and early
1940s. Sixty years later in 1999 and thirty minutes up the highway, the Wildlife
Conservation Society
opened its own version of a “hall of African Mammals”. The Bronx Zoo’s six and
a half acre Congo Gorilla Forest also seeks to transport visitors
to the heart of Africa. The zoo uses live animals and takes visitors on a simulated
Congo wildlife safari beneath a canopy of leaves, through sprays of mist, and
up to treetop lookouts.
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| American Museum of Natural History |
The gorilla diorama at the museum is beautiful, and
carefully crafted, like a piece of exquisite artwork, but it is static and
never changes. The zoo gorilla exhibit is also carefully crafted but it is
dynamic and constantly changing. The museum viewers stand in hushed reverence
while zoogoers are raucous, like the jungle.
And like the two sides of the same coin, both museums and zoos have
similar purposes – to communicate a message to a variety of audiences. The Bronx Zoo’s tagline is “connecting people to
wild nature” while the American Museum of Natural History seeks to “discover,
interpret, and disseminate … knowledge about … the natural world”. In short,
they are both committed to education.
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| Bronx Zoo |
It took some time, but eventually I came to
appreciate the educational value of our museum in Sioux Falls. We had a number
of rare animals that our local citizens would otherwise never have an
opportunity to see. It is difficult to appreciate the height of a giraffe or
the mass of an elephant until you are directly underneath one. The collection
even had a Giant Panda. It was not part of the original “hunted” collection,
but had been donated later. If we could link the zoo collection with the museum
collection there was, I felt, an opportunity to provide a uniquely
complete animal experience. This is one of the reasons that, when the Toledo
Zoo came calling with a job opportunity, I had to take it. They also had a
museum, although one with no mounted animals, and on August 8th,
1991 I departed Sioux Falls for the next chapter of my life in Toledo, Ohio.
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