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It was my privilege to develop and help man the Interpretation Station in the Honolulu Zoo's Manyara Bird Sanctuary, a large, walk-in aviary housing various African birds. The Honolulu Zoo is home to a number of interpretation kiosks. These kiosks and the volunteers that man them, i.e. Interpreters, perform live, on-site presentations using various artifacts. It had been a wish for the Zoo to have an Interpretation Station in the Manyara Bird Sanctuary. Ideally, this Station would facilitate:
Studies show that people learn better when they feel secure in their surroundings (1). Thus, welcoming visitors and presenting the aviary content to them were considered important functions of the Kiosk. Representing the Zoo’s mission required a little more preparation. The visitors to the aviary consist for a large part of children of grade levels preschool - 4th. For the Kiosk to serve as a center for environmental education, biological study, and recreation/conservation activities for these visitors, I wanted it to supplement – in a fun way! – the school science standards of these grade levels. My first step on this path was to develop two worksheets: Animal Body Parts and The Food Web. These worksheets cover some of the Unity/Diversity themes and some of the Interdependence themes in the school science standards. The sheets are color prints that have been laminated. Visitors can borrow the sheets and a dry-erase marker during their visit to the aviary, and fill them in. When they are done with them, they hand them back to the Interpreter to be wiped clean for the next set of visitors. My next step on this path was to collect various artifacts for use in the Kiosk. Educational institutions such as zoos should emphasize the unique experiences available there, not just offer classroom-style education (2). This can entail (in addition to providing a free-choice environment for exploring live animal exhibits) letting visitors see and handle authentic objects. “Two-dimensional media they can see elsewhere!(3)” I collected the following bird skulls: Turkey Vulture, Pheasant, Domestic Goose and House Sparrow. These skulls serve as introductions to the feeding ecology of some of the birds in the aviary, namely the Hooded Vulture (carnivore/carrion eater), the Vulturine Guineafowl (scratches and digs for seeds, tubers, etc.), the Comb Duck (filters water with bill) and various finches (crack hard seeds with powerful beaks). Not only are these artifacts a valuable addition to the interpretation activities in the Savanna Aviary, but the variety of feeding ecologies and habitat adaptations represented by the structures and functions of the three bird skulls serve to facilitate numerous valid points regarding unity and diversity in the animal world, and the interdependence of plants and animals in the wild (science standards). To date, the Station has been a great success with children and adults, and the Zoo has received much positive feedback from visitors. 1) Falk & Balling (1982): The field trip milieu: learning and behavior as a function of contextual events. Journal of Educational research 76(1): 22-28 2) Falk & Dierking (2000): Learning from museums: visitor experiences and the making of meaning. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press 3) Ibid |
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