This exhibit only just opened in April and parts of it replicate an abandoned silver mine. The jaguar den looks like the entrance to a mine shaft, there is a rundown cabin and rusty vehicle adjacent to the enclosure, and as usual at The Living Desert the exhibit is of fairly high quality. There is a single female jaguar at the zoo but I believe that the studbook keeper works there and a docent told me that there is hope that a male jaguar will arrive within a year or two. I uploaded a dozen photos of the exhibit into the gallery.
Thanks for posting photos of the new exhibit! The exhibit came out better than I thought. It is also refreshing to see a jaguar exhibit that is not themed to the rain forest.
A minor quibble: it's unfortunate that the designers of this exhibit didn't appreciate how much better this view would be if a shade structure was placed over the visitors' heads, obscuring the ugly mesh/glass connection. Think Woodland Park jaguar, Bronx snow leopard, or even the Living Desert African leopard exhibits.
And the mining shaft is a lazy way to hide necessary service structures.
A minor quibble: it's unfortunate that the designers of this exhibit didn't appreciate how much better this view would be if a shade structure was placed over the visitors' heads, obscuring the ugly mesh/glass connection. Think Woodland Park jaguar, Bronx snow leopard, or even the Living Desert African leopard exhibits.
And the mining shaft is a lazy way to hide necessary service structures.
Nice design tidbit, the shade would cut some of the reflection off the glass too. The service structure could have easily been hidden if they had situated it differently.
I'm not that into introducing human elements into exhibits, unless it provides some form of animal enrichment or there is some sort of clear, historical, educational message involved. Although, I would say it provides visual interest to ordinary zoo visitors. Does the exhibit say anything about salt-mines and their association with the west or deserts?
