Zoo Update from Connie Morgan

I’ve been thinking a lot about community. What is community? What holds it together? How does it go forward? It’s both a place and a fellowship, and, as our members Pamela and Glen Cooper illustrate, the Los Angeles Zoo “community” played matchmaker in bringing them together for a lifetime.

Birds are a part of our community as well. I know that one of my life’s most pleasurable moments is being in the yard in the morning and taking a moment to shut my eyes and just listen. It’s not traffic or planes that I hear, but the sound of birdsong. Clear or trilling, high and low, calling from all directions, it all sounds perfect and peaceful, or, in the case of the famous Los Angeles wild parrots (13 feral species!), comical. This “soundtrack” in our lives is not to be taken for granted. You may remember, as I do from childhood, regular sightings of flocks of birds flying in formation as they migrated south and then north again. Curator of Birds Mike Maxcy shares that these treks are getting harder for bird kind, but there are things we can each do to help them succeed. In this Year of the Bird, so named in honor of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act’s centennial, we can do this and more. Learn more at this year’s Wild for the Planet celebration that kicks off on Earth Day weekend (April 21 and 22) and continues through Endangered Species Day on May 18.