Decimus Burton was London Zoo’s official architect from 1826 to 1841, and his so-called ‘Raven Cage’ was actually first built to house a pair of King Vultures.
19 : Raven cage
1829
Decimus Burton was London Zoo’s official architect from 1826 to 1841, and his so-called ‘Raven Cage’ was actually first built to house a pair of King Vultures.
Menageries – collections of live wild animals for display – have been known for at least 5,500 years, with remains of the most ancient (so far) unearthed at Hierakonpolis, Egypt, in 2009. They mostly featured dramatic large mammals, but Ostrich was certainly present in the 18th century in the Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London, where one died swallowing nails in 1791, due to the prevalent belief that the species could digest metal. The menagerie was first opened to the public during the reign of Elizabeth I in the 16th century.
Aviaries, or flight cages, are large mesh or net enclosures or captive areas where birds can fly relatively freely, often with some approximation of natural habitat or at least perches and feeding areas assembled within. These structures were most probably first used to display birds in the 19th century, and the Raven Cage in London Zoo is widely viewed to be one of the first, dating from 1829. This was still not much more than a very big cage, and the first large aviary in a zoo was at Rotterdam Zoo in 1880.
Very large aviaries were developed in several American institutions in the early 20th century, and the 1904 World’s Fair Flight Cage in St Louis Zoo became the largest ever bird cage; it still exists today. The World’s Fair organisers paid $3,500 for the cage, leaving them with insufficient money to populate it with birds; locals had to donate a few owls, Mandarin Ducks and Canada Geese.
It occurred to zoo owners that some aviaries were getting large enough for the public to actually walk among the birds. The Antwerp Zoo cage system was developed in 1948, with the public walkway kept dark while the birds were well-lit, the latter avoiding the path due to it being ‘night’ there. The 1960s saw several walk-in aviaries being built, with Frankfurt Zoo developing first its Bird Thicket in 1963 – 10 connected aviaries featuring different habitats – and then the Bird Halls, with a walk-through simulation of a tropical rainforest among other buildings. The following year, the ever-innovative London Zoo opened the huge Snowdon Aviary, still in use today.
Frankfurt’s expansive offering was trumped by New York’s Bronx Zoo with its two-storey World of Birds exhibit, featuring 25 one-way walk-through habitats, then the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska, USA, with its Simmons Aviary opening in 1983 with more than 500 birds from all parts of the globe. The largest aviary in the world is Birds of Eden, Plettenburg Bay, South Africa, which opened for business in 2005, and extends over 21,761m2, holding about 3,000 individuals of some 200 bird species.
While many conservationists and birders are ambivalent about exotic birds being held in cages, there can be no doubt that many such collections are useful for highly sensitive species preservation projects. Bird collections have been largely responsible for the continued survival of species once near extinction, like Hawaiian Goose and Bali Starling, and have been instrumental in developing the captive breeding projects that keep birds like these out of the annals of the lost.