KID STUFF : Adventure Island, $8.3-Million Replacement for Children’s Zoo, Re-Creates Natural Habitat

Imagine that you could put on a helmet in the shape of a mountain lion’s head, and see the way it sees. And do the same with a bee, and a rabbit.

Then you could poke your head through a plexiglass dome and be face to face with real live prairie dogs.

All of this will be part of the new children’s zoo, Adventure Island, opening in April at the Los Angeles Zoo. The $8.3-million replacement for the old children’s zoo is about half built now, so on Monday officials from the zoo and the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn. unveiled the planned exhibits and educational programs.

“This is not the old concept of children’s zoos,” said Warren Thomas, zoo director, not at all like the old petting zoo the new one is replacing. “The ho-hum concrete and steel boring embarrassment is gone.”

The new children’s zoo is a series of “landscapes” re-creating natural Southwestern desert, shore or mountain habitats. Each will contain animals that live in those environments, such as vampire bats in a cave, or rattlesnakes in a desert.

So far, large chunks of reinforced concrete have been shaped into boulders and then painted to look like limestone, sandstone and shale. But the “shoreline” is still a ditch, and the cave a wall of concrete blocks.

Cascading Waterfall

“You have to picture it,” Deborah Pollack said as she gave a tour of the new construction, waving one arm vaguely to the right. “A waterfall will be cascading down over there, cascading into the sea lion pool. . . .”

“The effort is to turn this into something meaningful,” Thomas said. Children’s zoos have lagged behind changes that have taken place over the last few decades at main zoos, other officials said, letting children pet goats without teaching them anything about the way animals really live.

As Thomas spoke to zoo association officials and some schoolchildren on a field trip from Norwalk, he held a fluffy, 5-month-old red fox called Dozer.

Dozer arrived at the zoo recently after being found wandering at the new Hyperion sewage treatment plant near the Los Angeles International Airport. Officials believe that a bulldozer destroyed her foxhole, and this led to her strange name.

Dozer will live in the new children’s zoo, Thomas said, as one of 31 different kinds of animals, reptiles and birds.

The petting zoo will be re-created at a Spanish-style hacienda built on the 6-acre site, but in a new form. This time people have to stay on their side of the fence and will be able to touch the horse, donkey, goat, cow or pig only if they come close.

“Quite honestly, we have more respect for the animals than we used to,” Pollack said of the new petting rules. “It’s going to be the animals’ option.”

Adventure Island will also have a theater, for staging animal shows, and a nursery for baby animals unable to stay with their natural mothers. The latter will have large windows, so people will be able to see keepers preparing food and then feeding the babies.

“It’s scaled for children, and aimed at children,” Thomas said, “but I think children of all ages will be enthralled with it.”