Each year, operating with a $2.8 million budget, Connecticut”™s Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport ”” the only accredited zoo in the state ”” educates 150,000 people.
Fifty-thousand are students visiting the zoo for programs; another 100,000 visitors engage its general educational offerings, including lectures delivered, at least in part, by high school students from the zoo”™s national award-winning Conservation Discovery Corps program.
The Conservation Discovery Corps is seven years old. In 2013 it was a runner-up in the Association of Zoos and Aquariums contest”™s education category; this year it won first place.
The cutoff for the Beardsley Zoo”™s contest cohort was a $5 million operating budget. “So we”™re not competing against the likes of Sea World,” said Jim Knox, 49, the Cornell University-educated curator of education at the zoo and before that the zoo”™s predator keeper. He termed the AZA contest submission process “exhaustive” and designated the award “a big deal in our world.”
A total 280,000 people visit the zoo each year. Beyond that, off-site outreach includes three to four “Zoomobiles” that ferry animals to schools, senior residences and the like ”” with boa constrictors, alligators and owls along for the ride.
For businesses interested in an outing or a team-building exercise, Nigerian dairy goats mesmerize as few CEOs ever could. The zoo”™s department of development and marketing handles corporate events. There is also an indoor carousel of spectacular scale and detail available for rent.
The zoo is both a regional and global facility, one of 236 in the world with the AZA”™s topmost accreditation. Because of its status, the Beardsley has animals rarely seen anywhere: Andean condors and, from the Amur River Valley on the border of southeastern Russia and northern China, an Amur leopard and a pair of Amur tigers ”“ sometimes called Siberian tigers ”“ the biggest in the world.
There are only 30 to 35 Amur leopards left in the wild, Knox said, a number that was 50 to 80 just a few years ago. The leopards eat wild pigs that eat pine nuts. As humans increasingly encroach on their habitat and cut down the pines, both pigs and leopards are impacted. Poaching, too, is a problem.
Red wolves and maned wolves battle extinction as well from their corrals on the 200-acre Frederick Law Olmsted-designed grounds. About 40 animals ”” including a blue-tongued skink and a blue and gold macaw ”” are used for teaching.
The zoo dates to 1922 when Beardsley Park, designed in1884, became its home. The park, on land donated by James Walker Beardsley, was already well known as a walking ground for P.T. Barnum”™s circus animals and several of them, including a stubborn camel that blocked Bridgeport traffic until it was driven to the new zoo in a horse ambulance, would form the backbone of the new zoo.
In a youth success story, the zoo runs the Conservation Discovery Corps. There are currently 53 high school students in the program, which in September was named the best educational program in the country in the small-zoo cohort by the AZA. The Beardsley also partners with the Boy Scouts of America for a co-ed Zoo Explorer Post that now has 32 explorers.
The Conservation Discovery Corps students do field research and field work. Sixty percent are girls. An outing might involve counting snails (in waders) for data input or rooting out invasive species like phragmites and mile-a-minute vine. They also conduct outreach, teaching tour groups and, especially, small children. Knox said the youngsters relate well to the high school corps teachers because high school possesses great cachet in their grade-school world.
Knox called the field and teaching efforts of the Conservation Discovery Corps “cross pollinating” by working with other zoo programs like Trout in the Classroom, which has established a sustaining trout population in the Pequonnock River for four years running after a century of species elimination.
As for quantifying what the program has accomplished, he said, “In terms of cost-effectiveness, our measures are nonstandard.” Conservation Discovery Corps students have attended and are attending top colleges, including the Ivies, he said.
“We have students now in the UConn honors program,” Knox said. “We have had students participate who are now in veterinary school. The AZA wanted to know what tangible measure of success we could demonstrate. We said, ”˜Here are some of the schools our students attend.”™ These are A students.”
A tour beside spellbound zoogoers on a recent fall day indicated animals retain their abilities to teach and to fascinate. Knox said that by training youths to be teachers and nature lecturers, there is the potential for outsized payback with the students acting as conservation ambassadors when they leave the zoo.
“Some of these students could not name the local river when they started,” he said. “Now, they have helped restore it. It”™s science first and foremost, but they are having a blast. And the proof is in the pudding: Our enrollment goes up every year.”
Knox said he is just a cog in the zoo”™s educational efforts. He said a dozen educators work on the Conservation Discovery Corps program, including Jackie Westlein, zoo educator, and Gian Morresi, the Conservation Discovery Corps coordinator, with whom he toured the zoo. “No one person won the award,” he said. “We”™re very proud of the staff here.”
“We are mentoring and teaching the leaders of tomorrow,” Westlein said. “Conservation has a broad menu and it is critically important. No matter the field these students choose, what they learn inside the zoo will readily translate to the business community and to a career path in business or science. They become educators, public speakers, advocates. We have definitely helped make a better citizen.”
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