New at the Desert Museum: A Unique Mountain Habitat

ARIZONA-SONORA DESERT MUSEUM'S NEW MOUNTAIN HABITAT...

It's home to mountain lions, foxes, white-tailed deer, black bears, and gray wolves.

'It Looks Like We Put Bears in There!'

The young male bear emerged first, his quivering black muzzle sweeping the air and ground with nasal radar. He crept along a wide ledge cantilevered from a cliff, paws inching forward at first in careful, wary, tentative steps. But he quickly grew bolder. His pace quickened. He prowled the full length of the ledge, wedged his head into several small caves and crevices, and paused atop a thronelike rock to survey the unfamiliar sky and the rocky kingdom that stretched out in front of him. He ambled down to the river, chased an imaginary rabbit across a log, and ate a shrub willow. Then, like a 200-pound puppy, he bounded back to the ledge to nuzzle his female playmate and if we dare anthropomorphizereport happily on the large, open, canyonlike habitat that this morning replaced their dreary cage. Architect Aram Mardirosian, designer of this artificial canyon, was beaming. “I love the idea that you have to look for the animals in a landscape,” he said. “You can see how they live, adapt, move, and how they relate to other animals and the land around them. In a normal zoo situation, they're just on exhibit, like illustrations in a catalog. They don't do any of the things they'd do in their natural environment.” As Mardirosian was philosophizing, the bear was analyzing. No longer tentative, he clasped projecting rocks on the vertical wall and shinnied toward blue sky with amazing speed. The architect's smile evaporated. A man standing on top of the cliff raced over with a broom, and, for a few seconds, there was this half-alarming, halfcomical standoff: the man poking the broom at the bear's face, the bear clinging to the cliff like a fat brown fullback reading the defense. Man, broom, and gravity won. Bear backed down and proceeded to eat another tree. And Mardirosian's pulse re-paired to double digits. “We were worried about that one spot,” he confessed. “It didn't take him long to find it.” This was a sunny February morning in 1986, the month the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum provided a man-made canyon for twenty-two of its animals. The museum's new Mountain Habitat cost 2.5 million dollars to design and build-the most ambitious and expensive project in the institution's thirty-five years. Its implications radiate far beyond the museum's twelve acres. I have visited zoos around the world, from Washington, D.C., to Beijing (Peking), China, and though there is an encouraging trend toward better treatment of the inmates, as often as not I still leave angered and depressed. But not here. The Mountain Habitat is the best man-made home for animals I have seen, so good it should be the paradigm of zoo architecture for the rest of the century. The habitat houses ten of the muse-

Um's most interesting mammals: two black bears, two mountain lions, two gray foxes, two Mexican gray wolves, and two white-tailed deer. There are twelve birds: one Steller's jay, two thick-billed parrots, two ravens, two Montezuma quail, and five Merriam's turkeys. It also is an arboretum, incorporating about a hundred species of plants.

It is modeled after the Sonoran Desert's "sky islands"-mountain ranges poking 7000 to 11,000 feet into the air. These rocky barriers ambush wet air masses that otherwise would sail on to Colorado or Oklahoma, and the resulting rainfall sustains oak and pine forests and an environment for many kinds of animals that could not survive on the arid, austere dese floor. The contrast between Tucson and the Santa Catalina Mountains is typical. Tucson, elevation 2,389 feet, averages 11.14 inches of rain a year. Palisades Ranger Station, less than ten horizontal miles to the north, nestles in the Catalinas a mile higher and bathes in 29.69 inches of rain and snow. Of course, that isn't desert at all. It's cool, moist, and green. But the Desert Museum feels that its responsibility is more than snakes and cacti; it aspires to tell the full story of life within the boundaries of the Sonoran Desert. That means mountain forests, saguaro-studded foothills, grasslands, and the subtropical riverine habitats of southern Sonora. The Desert Museum's 1980 master plan called for all four of these ecosystems to be recreated in a neat row on the museum grounds. The first is the Mountain Habitat. Look for the other three around 1990.

The idea of the Mountain Habitat was born about fifteen years ago. An early model depicted an artificial mountain bursting out of the museum grounds to the height of a three-story building. It would have been an Architectural Presence, but a later museum management reconsidered. The philosophy today is to leave the existing land as nearly undisturbed as possible, in the faint hope that Arizona's cities might think about doing the same. "We visited a lot of zoos looking for the state of the art in exhibit design," explained Dan Davis, museum director. "We got some ideas, but the thing we wanted most we didn't find anywhere. It's very subtle. We wanted to preserve a certain mood that a zoo normally can't. They're dealing with far more people; so they have noise, transit systems, and they end up with mobs of visitors rushing from one animal to the next. What we wanted was to have the experience of a very casual stroll along a mountain trail."

So the "mountain" became a mountain-terrain canyon, sunk into the earth. Today, looking across the museum from high ground, you see only a low, crescent-shaped outcropping of thoroughly convincing rock that looks like it's been there since, say, the Paleozoic. "Our first concern was that it fit into the landscape, not obstruct views or impact on other exhibits," says Mardirosian, a veteran museum designer with The Po-tomac Group of Washington, D.C. "But besides making it unobtrusive, we also wanted to have an element of surprise."

They have it. You stroll along a path past desert plants like prickly pear, jump-ing cholla, and the exquisitely self-descriptive shindagger agave. Turn a corner, and the desert simply blinks out. You are now in the biological community known as

REID PARK ZOO Turning an odd gift into a small treasure

Tucson's municipal zoo was conceived by accident, born without notice, and brought up in poverty. But today, although it is neither large nor famous, it is one of the city's treasures.

This zoo began with a Texan's odd gift of half a dozen prairie dogs to a Tucson city employee. Workers built a big concrete dish in a park, filled it with dirt, and gave it to the burrowing rodents. In the mid-1960s, people began dropping off unwanted pets and farm animals, and it became a modest petting zoo. Then one day, a castaway monkey appeared, and shortly after that a new line materialized in the proposed 1967-68 city budget. Item: city zoo, 49,404 dollars.

"What's this?" exclaimed a city councilman. "What zoo?"

The zoo had been created by a city employee, acting on his own. He was Gene C. Reid, parks and recreation director. When he retired eleven years later, the city council gave his name to the zoo.

Reid's forte was the creative management of scraps. "He would call a private contractor," recalls Charles Albanese, the zoo's current architect, "and he'd say, 'I've got 800 feet of cyclone fence here. Next time you've got half a load of concrete left over, bring it over and let's install the fence."

Still, the fact Reid had nothing but scraps to work with made the zoo a magnet for criticism in those early days. It was overcrowded with donated animals, and they lived in small, barren concrete cages. A newspaper editorial in 1973 termed it "Tucson's ugly duckling."

The city listened to its conscience. Ivo Poglayen, a professional zoologist, was hired in 1975 to run the zoo. In 1980 Albanese's firm, Brooks & Associates, was hired to design a string of new exhibits. The budgets still would be modest: 200,000 dollars for the waterfowl, 334,000 dollars for the lions, and 425,000 dollars each for the Bengal tigers and Malayan sun bears. But this was enough to turn it into a respectable, modern zoo.

The most attractive of the post-1980 exhibits is that of the waterfowl, which looks and works like a tropical oasis spliced into the desert. Its authorized inhabitants include fifteen flamingos, but there also are assorted ducks that splash down for the winter, apparently reasoning that Tucson's dole is easier than pecking out a living in Mexico. No barriers separate birds and people in this user-friendly exhibit; no rules discourage touching.

The lion, tiger, and sun bear exhibits comprise natural landscape augmented by artificial boulders. Unlike the Desert Museum's Mountain Habitat, there are hard barriers-bars or reinforced glass-at the viewing areas. But the habitats are open to the sky; the animals pad around on honest grass, and they exhibit some natural behavior. The zoo also features natural habitat exhibits for zebras, ostriches, antelopes, cranes, blackbucks, wallabies, elephants, and rhinoceroses.

Albanese recalls the fascination of watching the lions prowl around their new home after it opened in 1983. Junior, the old male, died early in 1986. The newspapers carried tender obituaries. Early this year, they also noted the passing of the dark, grim concrete cells that had housed the diminutive sun bears for so long. There were no tears.

Reid Park Zoo

Getting there: In Tucson, take Broadway Boulevard to Randolph Way, turn south on Randolph Way, then continue for three-quarters of a mile to the "zoo" sign and turn right.

Admission: Reid Park Zoo is open daily except Christmas and New Year's Day. Winter hours: 9:30 A.M. to 4:30 PM. Summer hours (Memorial Day to Labor Day): 8:00 A.M.to 4:00P.M.; weekends, 8:00 A.M. to 6:00P.M. Admission charge. Snack bar and gift shop. Plaza picnic facilities in surrounding park; stroller rental.

Activities: A graphic informational system provides details on the animals and birds. Guided tours upon request, plus interpretive programs.

For more information: Reid Park Zoo, Parks and Recreation Department, 900 South Randolph Way, Tucson, AZ 85716; telephone (602) 791-4022.

The Mexican Pine-Oak Woodland, explor-ing a canyon complete with gurgling stream, turquoise pools, and glaring lions. Mardirosian's second concern was that the habitat look nothing like a typical zoo. No bars, no cages, no sense of thumbing from page to page in a zoological catalog. He wanted humans to feel a part of the habitat, not an audience. He even grouped plantings in ways to help shield clumps of viewers from each other.

He used the predator-prey relationship as a prime design element, winding a semicircular canyon of lions, bears, foxes, and wolves around a meadow for deer and turkey-with the trail for homo sapiens squeezed in between. The only barriers separating all these species are mathematical calculations. Mountain lions, for example, can't leap more than twenty feet-so it is believed, anyway. Adding ten percent for insurance, Mardi-rosian designed the cat canyon so that every possible trajectory to an unautho-rized meal is twenty-two feet or more.

He also sweated the details. For example, he measured and mapped every nearby saguaro. Then, back at his drafting table in Washington, he plotted the path through the habitat to avoid what he calls "visual non sequiturs." He didn't want people to look up and see cacti towering over the woodland.

The museum staff is ecstatic. What makes it worth all the money and effort, they say, is the animals' return to near-normal behavior.

On one recent morning, I learned how a twelve-pound fox defends its space against the bears that share the same twelve-hundred-square-foot enclosure: it backs into one of the coves Mardirosian thoughtfully provided, bares an arsenal of enameled daggers, and snaps. The bear responds in a manner confirming its reputed intelligence: it retreats and finds a tree to eat.

Another visit found the ravens in an uproar, piercing the woodland's peace with raucous demands for exit visas. Reason: the lioness had crouched down in sphinx pose just a step away from their enclosure to stare. And stare. It was a stare meant to burn through the thin wires separating the lion from the birds' en-closure, and she seemed ready to wait a long, long time.

She was still and silent, as the lions that lived in the Desert Museum's old con-crete cages had been. But that was a si-lence drugged by endless boredom. This was the silence of a hunter.

So does the Mountain Habitat finally solve the central ethical problem inherent in zoos? It doesn't bore, demean, or other-wise exploit the creatures on exhibit for our edification and entertainment. Well-seemingly not.

As the thoughtful Mardirosian says, "I really don't know what 'happiness' is for the animals. But obviously, if they have lots of space, and plenty of places to romp around, they're going to behave more naturally. We are unfair to them in one sense: we don't give them places to hide from the visitors. But we have given them plenty of choices, plenty of space. The bears shouldn't complain about living here."

As far as we humans can tell, the bears haven't. They have simply been doing what bears do, which perhaps is evidence enough of the habitat's success.

They have dug up the underground irrigation system. They have eaten all the plants. They have staged bear Olympics in the cypress trees, killing them. With the exhibit only a little more than a year old, the curator of birds and mammals, Peter Siminski, is a bit embarrassed about its physical condition.

"It looks," he says, with a trace of a grin, "like we put a couple of bears in there."

Selected Reading

Mammals of Arizona, by Donald F. Hoffmeister. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1986.

The Sonoran Desert, by Christopher Helms. KC Publications, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1986.

Pebbles in Your Shoes, by William H. Carr. Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, 1982.

Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Getting there: The museum is located fourteen miles west of down town Tucson. To reach it by car, take West Speedway Boulevard to Gates Pass Road. Follow Gates Pass Road to Kinney Road and the museum entrance.

Admission: The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is open every day from 8:30 A.M. to sundown. From June 1 through Labor Day, the museum opens at 7:00 A.M. Admission fee. All exhibits and restrooms are wheelchair accessible. Snack bar. Picnic facilities at Tucson Mountain Park. Gift shop.

Activities: Live animal exhibits, desert plant species in natural settings, Earth Sciences Center, live animal and plant demonstrations, guided tours, interpretive talks. Indoor exhibits are in air-conditioned buildings. Water fountains and shade ramadas are located throughout the grounds.

Nearby attractions: Saguaro National Monument, Old Tucson (movie set), San Xavier Mission, University of Arizona, Fort Lowell Park and Museum, Tucson.

For more information: Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, 2021 North Kinney Road, Tucson, AZ 85743; telephone (602) 883-1380. Tucson Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 991, Tucson, AZ 85702; (602) 792-2250.