The Elephants at the End of the Hall
When I stood at the doorway and peered in, the hall was mainly dark, and, to me, a kid, it seemed pretty long. But at the end of the hall was Africa. Elephants. A whole family group, at a water hole on the plains of the Serengeti, in the bright sunlight, the flat glare, of that continent. It was like you could walk right into Kenya. It actually gave me a chill, made my stomach flutter.
A big, African sky faded into the distance. Africa went on forever, apparently. Several Cape buffalo, to the right, looked at you with menace, ready to challenge your unwanted presence in the otherwise human-less scene. A giraffe delicately, and somewhat awkwardly, lowered its head to drink, its legs splayed. And the bull elephant – he was so tall! Huge! Are they really that big? He just stared out at you, and you didn’t dare step closer.
It was the hall of African mammals at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. Someone asked me recently what led me to become a wildlife biologist. I grew up in suburban LA. Wasn’t a 4H kid. Didn’t raise rabbits or pigs or calves. Didn’t hunt, only fished a couple times. We had a dog, of course, and a turtle. But those mammals, in that dark hall…they got to me. They were so REAL. Flesh and bone (well, probably not so much bone, taxidermy being what it is). Set in dynamic, real-life habitats and vignettes. With a few exceptions. The mountain lions in the North American hall were displayed in a chummy family group, which would NEVER happen in reality. Cat dads don’t hang with the fam; canids are social, but most felids aren’t. But seeing these animals up close, just behind the glass, or, in the case of the elephants, just beyond the velvet rope, it blew me away. I was in love.
I loved it all. The North American hall had bison, brown bears, and Alaska’s Dall sheep, which were surprisingly chunky, but, given their northern clime, that makes sense. I would later study desert bighorn in Death Valley, and I’ve always been taken by those large, curled horns. Maybe because of this early experience (or maybe because I grew up an LA Rams fan). The smaller side exhibits, some of which displayed nocturnal mammals such as porcupines or martens, were dimly lit and mysterious.
Like the elephants in the Africa room, the moose scene was the piece de resistance of the North American hall. At its end of the hall, it was a sunny day in Alaska, with moose emerging from the reeds and fall foliage. I may have actually preferred the North American hall to the African one, because, well, it was my home court. I lived on this continent, and shared it with these mammals.
The Natural History Museum also housed dioramas of California history, with Spaniard explorers and missionaries and Natives frozen in time. There was another museum down there in Exposition Park, the Museum of Science and Industry, which I absolutely loved, as well. The basement of that museum had two rooms which fascinated me. One, the redwoods room, housed dioramas of redwood trees, and you felt you were in the quiet glades of a forest of giants. And then, the train room, a highlight for me – is that why I have a model train in my garage? O-gauge trains (the Lionel size) circled the room, chugging through California landscapes: mountains and deserts, beaches and citrus groves, the Central Valley, day gradually giving way to night in each scene.
It’s gone now. That museum was upgraded into the California Science Center, and now has an IMAX theatre and a space shuttle. The old museum model of objects behind glass has yielded to more interactive exhibits, and I can’t find fault with that. Still, I miss the old museum rooms. There is something to be said for quiet contemplation of scenes which you will likely never visit. I also appreciate the painstaking attention to detail taken by the creators of these scenes, seamless detail unbroken by inconsistencies or incongruities, except for the confines of the exhibit space itself (and it’s amazing what curved walls can do for the experience).
These halls were, for me, portals into distant places and experiences. Physically, when you stepped into that dim hall, you were somewhere else, and you had access to these fantastic animals and places, many of which you would never see in your lifetime. Zoos can provide the same type of experience. And I know that zoos and aquariums have their detractors for the unnatural captivity of otherwise wild animals. But the conservation value of such institutions, and the encounters they allow us, cannot be underestimated. My daughter Carrie has studied whales and dolphins and will likely go on and do that in grad school, an interest fueled, in part, by trips to Sea World.
In a funny twist of fate, and one I could never have dreamed of, our island fox work was featured, briefly, at the LA County Museum of Natural History, in a temporary exhibit about work on endangered canids. Now, this is like growing up going to Dodger Stadium and then suddenly finding yourself playing right field for a game. Surreal for sure. And it became even more surreal. That exhibit was up during the 2002 fall season, when Notre Dame played USC at the LA Coliseum in November. Why is this relevant? I went to ND, in fact I grew up a Notre Dame fan in LA, in hostile Trojan territory, and my family had been attending the Notre Dame-USC games since the 1960s. And we tailgate right in front of the LA County Museum, under a sycamore tree on a grassy lawn between the Museum and the Coliseum. Only thing is, there are no restrooms. Beer being beer, we’d usually buy ONE Museum pass and pass it around (it IS a pass, after all) for bathroom breaks. So my mom got to see my picture – small though it was - in the LA County Museum of Natural History (granted, my mom pretty much thought I recovered the endangered island fox all by myself, and this certainly didn’t disabuse her of that notion). But it absolutely cracks me up that a picture of me doing biology appeared, however briefly, in the museum from which I took inspiration as a kid. And if I could parlay that into stepping into Africa – a Night at the Museum kind of thing – believe me, I would.
