Great Plains Zoo

The Great Plains Zoo & Delbridge Museum of Natural History resides in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Getting to Sioux Falls from Boise, Idaho was an adventure all its own, involving a stop in Yellowstone National Park and driving through the entire state of Wyoming in one day. Being in this region made me realize the true distance between major cities, the vastness of the west. In this context, it made sense that the ZooMobile outreach and Sanford ZooExpress would travel 150 miles or 4 hours away in order to reach communities.
These two programs were just two of the many that the Great Plains Zoo offered. Their Zoo Club provided educational opportunities for children 15 months to 6 years old and Zoo Camps for those aged 2 to 11. Each camp or class is custom designed and pulls on the variety of resources the zoo has (such as their Museum of Natural History) and they run year round.
While the Great Plains Zoo offered many outreach opportunities, they also had interesting on-site programming, such as Biofact Tours. These are 60 minute on-site guided tours with integration of Biofacts at relevant exhibits.
One of the things I found interesting about the Great Plains Zoo's education program was that despite of their large and active outreach program, the education animals were still integrated into the main education department and cared for by the education specialists. Many of the zoos I went to had education animal collections which were handled by a different department, such as an outreach program. Here the animals were more integrated into the program as a whole. Though as a caveat, I wasn't able to see the education animals in holdings or in action, so this observation is conceptual.
The education program and the zoo itself had another unique aspect - the integration of the Delbridge Museum of Natural History. When I first read the combined name and realized the two had a partnership, I assumed the Museum was in a separate building and completely apart from the zoo. Instead, I was greeted with mounted animal specimens upon my immediate entrance to the zoo. This combination seemed off at first - as I read in Savages and Beasts, most modern zoo visitors are aghast at any 'dead' animals. But the Great Plains Zoo combined these animals with pride, and as I was given a tour, I realized that the Museum was much like a very well-organized set of Biofacts. These animals were on display in the same way the animals in the zoo were - they were there to foster connections with the natural world and to educate. In fact, perhaps my comparison to Biofacts did not do them justice, because as the person I interviewed put it in perspective, those animals were all part of the collection, and the ones in the zoo just happened to be the live collection.
Overall my visit to the Great Plains Zoo was productive and atypical, but in a positive way. I was given the tour and interview by a person from marketing, which gave me the special opportunity to understand how other zoo departments may view education. It also highlighted how an effective education program can be a true marketing tool for zoos. And of course, my visit had to be pretty awesome because I got to ride a camel: