Barranquilla Chester

A Conservation story

First: a quick trip to…

Colombian Biodiversity

The Barranquilla Zoo is a 53 year-old urban zoo

5 acres of sizeHolds more than 150 species and 450

individuals, 85% native to Colombia.

This is the story of how we went from…

thisTo this

A few things our Old Zoo lacked of:

•Environmental education programs for school visitors.

•Appropiate exhibition spaces designed for our animals.

• Conservation campaigns that involved community participation

But we had a Plan:

And a young team willing to carry out:

To exhibits

So we went from cages

To green open areas

From mesh enclosures

From concrete floors

To vegetation and water

We still had to develop some conservation campaings

So with the Master Plan runing …

So we look for people interested in sponsoring

our projects. That’s how we met the Chester Zoo People

We had many candidates (but not so much money)

The Bear Campaign

Design of a new exhibit with interactive devices for visitors

We designed a workshop for the Zoo visitors, in them, the facilitator presents the participants a series of closed questions based on the “Big Idea” of the campaign.

The feedback of the answers is the key moment to offer information and to manage the key concepts of the program.

3,000 educational booklets were printed to support the educational interactive talks and workshops. To this date all booklets have been handed out

A Mini-site of Spectacled Bear was created with a wide repertoire of information and interactive resources based on the “Big Idea” of this educational program.

Our second experience together was the “Parrot

campaign”

The 2005-2006 educational campaign was oriented to reduce the use of parrots as pets in the city of Barranquilla.

54 schools (180% of the goal and 10% of total in Barranquilla) implemented the educational program, representing 100% of the schools that attended the workshop sessions with their teachers.

A total of 4,040 students (90% of the goal and 6% of total in Barranquilla) of these 54 schools participated in the program.

A total of 82 sessions were developed in local schools (some schools had more than one session with different groups of students).

The parrot campaign in numbers:

The evaluating method helped us understanding the change in children’s ideas about petting parrots.

A new Zoo exhibit with educative devices designed to evaluate visitors ideas

Went from this…

To this

And then…What’s next?