@Blackduiker: do you know why they shut down all of the nocturnal animal exhibits in the cave building except for the blind cave fish and the scorpions? Do you remember what species they had in there? On my one visit when I saw it when it was still an animal exhibit rather than just a play area (albeit a cool one) I remember vampire bats, ring-tailed cat, and striped skunk.
No I dont know why they shut it down, I would have to find a very old set of plans, but I do remember the bats and the skunk. There was a great show via a peppers ghost of Betty White with a clothpin on her nose. The show ran 30 seconds and was a great education show - there was one in the owl exhibit in the cave. They were the best things in the CZ - The problem we had was we gave the educational interactives as a menu with high tech (expensive), large muscle activity, small muscle activitys and mental. The idea was to pick one of each catagories for each area. The problem came from the selection committee who only picked the high tech and due to the cost could not have anything else. Of course the high tech items broke down and there was no budget to fix them. If we had to do it over again, we would have never presented it to the Zoo that way.
I remember the barn owls because we had to make the exhibit with sensors in the two perch areas so the proper "show" would start with the host pointing to the right perch say that is a barn owl. What was great about the show was the host then brings us a peppers ghost image of a elf owl to compare sizes with the existing barn owl.
What I don't understand is the peppers ghost images - barn owl and skunk have no movin parts to break. About the only thing that can go wrong is a burn out projection bulb. Not very costly to fix, but yet both "shows" have not been working for years.
Maybe the zoo should reevaluate some of there funds to fixing some of the old exhibits and educational devices. Things like the Childrens zoo and the waterfall in Monkey island would be fairly cheap but would add alot to the experience of visiting the zoo.
On the same note there are a lot of new cost effective pumps that could be used at Monkey Island that would cut the energy bill if that is one of the reasons for shutting down the system.
Also they could get some of the solar companys to invest in solar electric to help run this as well as other exhibits in the zoo such as what cincinnati zoo has done.
