This week on Wild Things, we’re celebrating a big Bronx Zoo milestone: the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the new Aquatic Birds House. On September 24, 1964, New York Zoological Society members flocked (sorry! had to do it!) to a preview of the new exhibit, which featured herons and spoonbills, rails and stilts, flamingos and ibises, storks and jacanas, avocets and hammerheads, stints and plovers, terns and cormorants, and other birds dependent on wetlands. Continue reading →

Processing the collection of Gloria Hollister Anable has been an enlightening experience not only because of her extraordinary life but also because of her obscurity. Relatively unknown outside of conservation circles, Hollister took part in several expeditions for the New York Zoological Society (NYZS), including Dr. William Beebe’s expeditions to Bermuda. During one such expedition to Nonsuch Island, Hollister descended in the Bathysphere, an underwater submersible, to a depth of 1,208 feet – at that time a record for a deep-sea dive completed by a woman. Hollister led her own expedition to British Guiana in 1936, worked in the first Red Cross blood bank during World War II, and in the 1950s was chairwoman of the Mianus River Gorge Conservation Committee. Continue reading →