Visit the Zoo in Omaha Nebraska

Travel with Bennett-Watt and discover the zoo in Omaha Nebraska.

Jim Watt: Here too, Nebraska’s most visited tourist attraction with over a million visitors a year, the Henry Doorly Zoo, rated in 2004 by Reader’s Digest as the number one zoo in the country. Dr. Doug Armstrong: This building we’re in now is the desert dome and it’s the biggest glazed geodesic dome in the world. Now, what we try to do with this building as well as several of our buildings is create immersion exhibits, so we bring new into the animal’s world and so you get a sense of not only the animal you’re looking at but the environment that it lives in, the plants that are there. We do all our plants are live plants. We don’t do artificial greenery. We try and do predator-prey relationships as well as the whole habitat thing. So, it conveys as much information non-painfully as possible. So, there are pumas up above and then quackeries down below. The little babies are grown. They really play. Jim Watt: The zoo’s Hubbard Gorilla Valley is a two acre cutting edge exhibit. Here, visitors are as much on display to the gorillas as they are to them. Dr. Doug Armstrong: We give them a lot of room to roll then a lot of niches to go into, so it’s a lot of diversity but public insignia. The large gorillas like to interact with people so, that’s kind of fun. People feel a little closer bond in just looking at them. They can actually interact with them if the animals choose to. Big, male gorillas are so impressive which were male. That’s part of that you can see going on here in the gorilla display is they maintain a relationship with each other but they got to have their space and they got to have places to get away. So, having this much diversity in the environment gives it a lot of places to get away. They can avoid confrontations with each other. The Aviary in the background is it was the biggest free-flight aviary in the world. There is actually a bigger one now but it’s still a huge aviary. We got many, many, many species of birds and in fact, we’d have some real successes because of the aviary, breeding species that historically had been difficult like the ibis and spoonbills and a number of species like that and of course there are chicks in the aviary now every summer as long as things go well, there will be chicks in the aviary. At one end they prefer the end above the pond. We got 50 or so species and actually you can see quite a few of them from this view. There are many geese down on the ground here. There are cattle egrets and snowy egrets. In the water, there are ibis, a stork, we got white stork. Back in the background, you can see scarlet ibis as well as spoonbills. There’s another stork back there. The crane far in the background so, it’s really easy to see the birds in here and it’s obviously a very activated area. There’s an ibis now straight here on this log in front of us all through these trees. There are most of the egrets and ibis. We’ve got them now and the spoonbill. We got three polar bears and they do enjoy the pool especially in the summer time when it’s warm like this. We keep water in it all year round but they use it the most in the summer time. Every place, you can do it and it’s safe, how ever you can do it safely. We like people close so with these little kids. They get a lot better feel for them except we’re looking at for the long distance away but hopefully develop some sense of caring and compassion and connectedness. Okay now, we’re in the Lied Jungle, a rainforest exhibit and we’ve got that two acre enclosure and we’ve got three major rainforest represented here. Everything is done solid geographically so the plants and the animals and the rocks and everything are appropriate to the geographic area, so first area is Asia and then you go into Africa and then South America and it’s interesting because we’ve got upper and upper canopy level walkway and then a lower floor level walkway. So, you can get a sense of the difference between the two life zones and all through the jungle and all of our exhibits, we try to do multiple level so because in the rainforest there are multiple life zones, so there should always be something up in the trees, something on the ground, something in the water, all the ways through the rainforest. I mean this has got a lot of free flying birds in here. So, if you’re a bird lover, it’s a good place to come but you have to be patient because it takes a long time to spot them off. It’s like you’re in the wild. Jim Watt: This zoo’s Kingdom of the Seas Aquarium features habitat from Polar Regions to the Amazon.