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Denver Zoo
The Denver Zoo occupies 80 acres
of land in City Park of Denver, Colorado and started in 1896, and
was the most popular attraction in the city in 2005. The zoo began
when an orphaned American black bear was donated and after building
the Bear Mountain, was the first zoo in the country to use
naturalistic enclosures to house their animals, rather than cages
with bars. It increased on this concept, the Primate Panorama, with
gigantic mesh tents and open areas for their monkey and apes; and
the Predator Ridge, that contains three separate enclosures that
rotate the animals, to overlap scents, which evidently give the area
environmental enrichment. Their newest exhibit, the Asian Tropics,
is in the process of construction, and it will be separated into
five separate areas for rotation of the numerous species that will
occupy. The first animal, the black bear, was named Billy Bryan,
after the President, and was donated to the mayor Denver, Alexander
J. Graham, who began the zoo with this creature. Other animals
included native waterfowl at Duck Lake, native prairie dogs and
antelope that wandered around the park and a marvelous flock of
Chinese pheasants that would eventually populate the eastern plains
of the state. Red squirrels came to the zoo's collection in 1905,
growing very quickly and overtaking the birds at Duck Lake. Someone
decided to shoot the little marauders, but when the public
discovered those plans, they naturally protested and as many as
could be caught of the pesky critters were taken to the Denver
Mountain Parks. By 1906, the zoo had become a motley menagerie and
Mayor Robert Speer said that the zoo's prison bars could be taken
away in favor of waterfalls, trees, concrete blocks and the like. He
then hired the city's landscape architect, Saco R. DeBoer, to design
plans for this reconstruction and put Victor Borcherdt in charge of
the zoo as director. Saco designed the Bear Mountain enclosure that
opened in 1918 and it is 43 feet tall and 185 feet long. It is
constructed of dyed and textured concrete forms cast from Dinosaur
Mountain, outside of Morrison, Colorado. They hid the moats to
replace the cage bars, then added an artificial stream to make it
look more natural. The enclosure's south end is a replica of Mesa
Verde National Park, and had held monkeys, but since they escaped
often, decided to put sea lions there. Presently coati live there,
with grizzly bears and Asiatic black bears living in the two other
areas. The Bear Mountain exhibit made Denver one of the premier zoos
in the nation, and Borcherdt was hired by the St. Louis Zoo after
they had seen what he'd done. The zoo contains many species
that come from around the world, that include; pachyderms, birds,
reptiles, hoofed mammals, carnivorous mammals and fish.
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