How it Works, by Karen Wrigglesworth
The free-flight aviary at Virginia Lake is a popular attraction for many visitors. It is another example of the many gifts that have been presented to the city by forward-thinking philanthropists and volunteers.
The present aviary was officially opened on Sunday 12 August 1979, along with the dovecote which stands nearby.
The concept of a free-flight design, which allows visitors up-close walk-through access to the birds, was a novel idea in the late-1970s. The Wanganui aviary proposal is attributed largely to Barrie Harvey of the Round Table. Considerable effort was made to come up with a suitable, workable design solution, and even then the aviary was not straightforward to construct.
Built largely as a volunteer project by the Wanganui Round Table organisation over a series of weekend ‘working bees’, the new aviary took two to three years to complete. The major difficulty encountered was finding a workable technique to fix the irregular shapes of wire mesh together, and to adequately support the aviary’s framework. Eventually, extensive welding of the wire mesh joints saw success achieved.
Rotating mesh doors were designed and fitted at either end to keep the birds enclosed. Security cameras, and an aviary extension, came about two decades later.
The Wanganui Round Table Group was awarded the Community Service Rosebowl in late 1979 for its contribution towards the new aviary at Virginia Lake.
Material costs for the 1979 project amounted to $11,000 – a large part of which was raised through public donations and grants from local organisations, including the council.
Similar ‘free-flight’ cages are now installed at various parks and wildlife facilities worldwide, and house both birds and animals. Structures such as the free-flight enclosures at Otorohanga and Brooklands Zoo, New Plymouth provide a unique experience for visitors, and an enhanced home for wildlife that is as ‘natural’ as possible for an exhibit enclosure. The free-flight aviary at Hamilton Zoo is the second largest enclosure of this kind in the world.
The present Virginia Lake aviary is not the first to have been erected at the reserve. Two earlier aviaries have entertained visitors, with the earliest dating back to 1942.
Many readers will remember the aviary that predated the current one – a five-section facility similar to aviaries still in use at the Victoria Esplanade Park in Palmerston North, among other places. This aviary stood between the Winter Gardens and the carpark, and when opened in 1960 was home to 60 birds. Council records contain many letters of thanks to local residents for donations of aviary birds, including finches, canaries and parakeets. There was even for many years a kea amongst the collection – before rules for keeping native birds changed.
The first Virginia Lake aviary was a gift from Mr and Mrs AW Larsen of Foster’s Hotel (now Stellar’s) in 1942, as an attraction for children to complement the recently completed Centennial Memorial Winter Gardens, which had been opened in 1940. Mr and Mrs Larsen owned “a very nice aviary of original design” together with twelve birds, which they were unable to take with them when they left the city that July.
The only stipulation the Larsens made was that the birds must not be sold or given away to be put in small cages.
The Mayor and council at the time gratefully accepted the gift, and arranged for the structure to be moved onto a concrete base at the lake reserve.
Keeping caged birds and animals is a very old tradition in many cultures. Maori were known to keep tui in cages and to teach them to ‘talk’, and Victorian England had a well-known fascination with zoology and natural things.
The bird cage at Rotterdam Zoo was the largest zoo aviary when built in 1880, though the Flight Cage built for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis in 1904 was larger (at 70m long, 25m wide, and 15m high). It remains one of the largest free-flight aviaries in the world today.
The immersion zoo exhibit, similar to a walk-through aviary in concept, was first developed by Carl Hagenbeck in 1907, and was revived and expanded following the opening of a ground-breaking gorilla exhibit at the Seattle Zoo in 1975. Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913) began collecting animals at 14, and later exhibited humans (including Nubians, Samoans and Inuits) as well as animals in ‘natural’ settings in his zoos. His ‘naturalistic exhibit’ ideas – though fortunately not his taste for human exhibits – is now common practice at zoos worldwide.
Special thanks to Gillian at the Council Archives for hunting out useful records for this piece, and wikipedia.
Karen Wrigglesworth is a local engineer and writer.