Have you ever ever checked out a duck? I imply actually appeared at one.
If in case you have, then you definitely’ve most likely seen how a duck one way or the other manages to seem sleek and goofy on the similar time, together with her rounded head nestled completely into her physique and her rubbery toes flapping beneath the water. Generally she’ll twist her elegant neck round to peck and pull at her wings, preening—which truly entails gathering oil from glands close to her tail and brushing it by means of her feathers to maintain them waterproof.
That is necessary work for a duck. And it may be good to look at, pondering how else she occupies her time and letting your thoughts wander again to childhood recollections of Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck and Robert McCloskey’s Make Means for Ducklings. I indulged on this for some time this week throughout a tour of the Nationwide Zoo’s Hen Home, in Northwest Washington, D.C. After six years of renovation, the exhibit will lastly reopen on March 13. There, I met diving bufflehead geese, pleasant northern pintails, and charming ruddy geese; I noticed nonducks too, together with shorebirds with their spindly circus legs and tiny fluttering warblers.
Like a duck, the Hen Home can look like a barely foolish idea. The Nationwide Zoo, and due to this fact the nationwide taxpayer, spent $69 million to create an exhibit stuffed with flying creatures you will discover in your individual yard—or at the very least in your basic area. There are many different, extra unique birds on this zoo and in different zoos on the East Coast—birds with rainbow plumage and impressively lengthy tails and glamorous pink legs. However that misses the purpose of the Hen Home: The revamped exhibit is supposed to have a good time the common, on a regular basis birds.
The walk-through aviary permits you to rise up near them, to find out about how even these widespread birds carry out the extraordinary job of migrating hundreds of miles between Canada and Central America every year. The aim can be to show us make our lives extra appropriate with theirs, not as a result of they’re particularly putting or endangered birds, however as a result of they’re our birds—North America’s—for at the very least a part of the 12 months.
I met Sara Hallager, the zoo’s longtime chicken curator, throughout my tour final week. “I wasn’t fairly certain how individuals would obtain these, you may say, nonexotic birds,” she instructed me. However she’s been gratified by the response. “I form of like to look at individuals’s faces as they arrive in,” she stated. “They only can’t imagine that they’re in with the birds.”
What precisely does a chicken curator do? First, Hallager oversees the entire avian species on the Nationwide Zoo and manages all of their keepers. As a result of the zoo is a part of a broader community of accredited zoos and aquariums, she additionally acts as a form of animal distributor, packing up particular person specimens and delivery them off to assist populate different zoos. Hallager’s primary job since 2008—when she first envisioned an exhibit of neighborhood birds—has been engaged on the Hen Home’s redesign.
The primary exhibit within the Hen Home is supposed to appear and feel just like the Delaware Bay, the estuary of the Delaware River and a serious relaxation cease for migrating shorebirds. A path lined with water tanks and sand resembles a seashore and smells like a barnyard. Right here, I used to be launched to long-legged avocets and dunlins, with their skinny beaks and noticed breasts. Clusters of tittering white sanderlings scurried round, and grasshopper sparrows flitted amongst reeds. I had by no means seen a dwell horseshoe crab earlier than, however right here was one proper now, swimming fortunately the wrong way up alongside the floor of the water. He has no predators within the Hen Home.
Generally, at night time, Hallager stated, the birds like to collect on the trail to sleep. “Do any of them ever really feel the urge emigrate?” I requested her. They may, she stated. However birds don’t migrate due to climate, she defined; they achieve this when their meals sources run out. Right here, that by no means occurs. In all of those displays, the birds are free to fly the place they need. They aren’t shy round people, Hallager defined, however they’ve their boundaries.
After I was a baby, my bird-loving dad and mom instructed me that I may seize a songbird just by shaking a little bit of salt on its wings. One winter day, excited by this prospect, I sat with my father within the woods for hours, ready for the birds to return shut sufficient to salt them. Whereas we waited, Dad taught me their names and their sounds: the tufted titmouse (“peter peter peter”), the blue jays (“cheeseburger! cheeseburger!”), and the occasional Carolina wren (“tea kettle, tea kettle”). My dad and mom had, after all, made up the salt trick, and I by no means caught a chicken. I don’t keep in mind feeling upset.
The second exhibit house alongside the trail was loud and vigorous. It goals to breed a breeding floor within the Prairie Potholes, the wetlands of the Higher Midwest and Canada, the place many birds spend the spring and summer season months. The trail runs by means of two swimming pools, permitting underwater views of logs and reeds, and they’re crammed with geese, all types. Just a few ruddy-duck males within the first pool splashed at us once we entered, and I gasped at their beautiful turquoise payments—a characteristic that lasts just for the breeding season, to impress females. And this feminine was! Black-and-white buffleheads chased and clambered over each other, wrestling for pellets that Hallager dumped into the pool.
From an indication on the entrance, I realized that some geese are divers, whereas others are dabblers. Divers sit low within the water and plunge underneath for his or her meals. However dabblers sit greater, munching on floor vegetation and bugs. The second pool was stuffed with dabblers with musical names: wigeons and teals and pintails and shovelers, all sitting or swimming or flapping or consuming.
The entire geese have been brown, however in various shades—russet, cinnamon, chocolate, tan—with an occasional swatch of white or inexperienced. A small northern pintail waddled out of the pool and onto the guests’ path, slowly approaching Hallager and me whereas we talked. Wanting on the duck, I remembered how an ex-boyfriend had as soon as described my aura as “completely brown”—ordinary-looking, he meant, and laborious to pick of a crowd. From a distance, this pintail might need blended in too. However up shut, her tawny-and-cream feathers have been beautiful.
Hallager wouldn’t admit to having a favourite chicken. When she joined the zoo in 1988, she needed to work as a keeper for seals and sea lions—however she was assigned to birds as an alternative. “I in a short time, inside a couple of minutes, fell in love with birds,” she stated. “They’re simply lovely. They’re so necessary to life on this planet, and to people.”
The temperature within the third room of the Hen Home is roughly 1 million levels. Supposed to copy a bird-friendly Central American espresso farm, this exhibit was a pointy distinction to the primary two: all lush tropicality. Palm timber and waxy-leafed monstera present shelter for the 67 particular person birds on this house; amongst them are palm warblers, mockingbirds, and scarlet tanagers. Whereas within the wild, you would possibly catch solely a short flash of an indigo bunting or a cedar waxwing, right here you’ve received a greater shot at recognizing and finding out them as they swoop between timber and perch on tables for lunch.
Once we entered, a small flock of inexperienced parakeets flew throughout the high-domed ceiling, which appeared jarringly unique till I noticed that every one of those birds are compatriots down south through the winter.
The Hen Home is consistently reminding guests that these birds are our accountability. A great way to assist them is to buy espresso grown in bird-friendly habitats, which merely implies that farmers in Central and Latin America develop espresso crops amongst different timber and plants as an alternative of clearing the land. Deforestation and habitat loss are the principle threats to birds like those right here, Hallager instructed me. The opposite prime killers are glass home windows and cats, which every kill at the very least 1 billion birds yearly. Placing decals in your home windows helps; the entire home windows within the Hen Home have stripes or dots etched on the glass to stop collisions. As for cats, Hallager begs, please hold them inside.
Overcome by the humidity of the espresso farm, the 2 of us sought refuge again within the Prairie Potholes. As we talked, the feminine pintail duck edged nearer to us, a curious glint in her beady eyes. “I imply, take a look at this little woman,” Hallager stated, beaming on the duck. “Inform me that chicken doesn’t have a character or a soul.”
