Oregon Zoo Africa Rainforest Exhibit

Africa Rainforest Exhibit

Overview

Completed in 1991, bats and a variety of tropical birds and waterfowl live in this tangle of lush vegetation.

In the Bamba du Jon Swamp building, visitors experience tropical thunder, lightening and a torrential downpour that passes over endangered slender-snouted crocodiles, lung fish and frogs.

In the Kongo Ranger Station, kids and adults get a hands-on educational experience and learn about the people of the rain forest, as well as the threats that animals face.

Walk Through the Exhibit

1. You start your travels at the Sankuru Trader, a trading post/gift shop from where a banded mongoose colony is visible.

2. A fog-shrouded sign beckons you to head down a winding trail, through dense vegetation, and into the canopy of the rain forest, an area so diverse in the wild that scientists have not yet classified and described many of its thousands of insects, plants, birds, mammals, and other animals. The path leads to a place where large, fruit-eating bats fly in a 180-arch around you. 75 bats live in this spacious exhibit. In the background, a mural gives you a view from the precipice of a hill, overlooking a fog-shrouded valley at sunset. A crevice in the wall beside the bats is home to Madagascar giant day geckos.

3. Exiting the bat area, you again walk through dense vegetation to an area where Allen's swamp monkeys frolic near a forest stream and Colobus monkeys scramble among the branches overhead. An African rock python is found in a cave along the trail.

4. A turn in the trail brings you to the Kongo Ranger Station, a simulation of a ranger compound that serves as a conservation interpretive area with hands-on exhibits about wildlife poaching and consumerism as it relates to the effect on plant and animal populations. Kongo Rangers will staff the exhibit during the summer months, informing you about their activities. When weather permits, they will bring out snakes and other animals for a closer look. Displays include ivory and other animal materials confiscated from poachers.

5. After leaving the ranger station, the trail becomes a boardwalk, snaking its way through a foggy marsh. Inhabitants of the marsh include yellow-billed storks, African white spoonbills, Hadada ibises, & African waterfowl.

6. Last stop is the Bamba du Jon Swamp Building (a "mixed species" exhibit), home of endangered African slender-snouted crocodiles, African lungfish, frogs, and leeches. Smaller free-flying birds will be overhead. While admiring the crocodiles, you will be surprised by a sudden darkening of the room and accompanying thunder and lightening. Rain will begin to fall over the crocodiles' pond, becoming a torrential downpour. (The rain goes off on the hour - lasts for 6 minutes.)

7. Visitors exit the Bamba du Jon Swamp Building and head back to the familiar Sankuru Trader.

Exhibit Art

Local artists Wague Baba Diakite & Ronna Neuenswander received a commission to create art for the exhibit under the Percent for Arts program.

Diakite is a native of Mali in W. Africa, & is well-known for his ceramic work. Ronna, his wife, is also a well-known local ceramicist.

The art they created is in three parts:

Four cast-concrete murals which are built into the gunite walls of the exhibit walk ways. Each is of an exhibit animal and each has a hand-written, West African saying about relationships between people and nature.
Six hand-embossed gunite lizards (also with hand-painted messages) and three ceramic fish fossils are incorporated into the exhibit walkways.
Just before the Kongo Ranger Station, the presence of man in the rain forest is noted with the "Wall of Hands." Under Wague's direction, Oregon Zoo volunteers and staff, construction workers and others placed their handprints in the wet gunite of the walkway wall. This is an age-old technique used in Mali to decorate construction.

Artist-In-Education Project

Lincoln High School students designed & painted the Sankuru Trader building through the Artist-in-Education program.

Individually, the students developed designs with guidance from project architect David Slusarenko & inspiration from photographs of painted housed in remote West African villages.

Once a design was selected, the students worked with Portland mural artist Jenny Joyce to learn the art of transferring the design to the building. (Joyce has done 3 other murals at our zoo.)

Project Cost: $4.3 million
Size: 1.3 acres
Location: West end of Africa exhibit
Construction: Began 3/13/90 by L. D. Mattson, Inc. of Salem.
Funding: Construction money came from 1987 serial levy. Kongo Ranger Station funded by $250,000 donation from Friends of the Zoo, the largest donation ever made by FOZ at that time. (Friends of the Zoo is now known as The Oregon Zoo Foundation)
Architects: GSA Partnership, P.C.

Africa Rainforest Exhibit

Overview

Animals

Walk Through the Exhibit

Exhibit Art

Artist-In-Education Project

Exhibit Information