Environment : Notes about your surroundings.

Last Days--This is the final week for the Natural History Museum of Orange County at its current site in a closed elementary school in Newport Beach. When the doors close to the public on Friday, museum staff and volunteers will start packing up for the move to a new interim site in Aliso Viejo.

“We’re shooting for a mid-November reopening,” said Dudley Varner, executive director of the museum. The new location in the Kohl Corporate Center offers almost 32,000 total square feet, with about 14,000 to be set aside for exhibits. Plans for future exhibits include a robotic dinosaur display from Orange County-based Dinamation and an exhibit of space equipment mock-ups.

The new building “is basically a shell,” Varner said. That means some construction will be needed before opening, but also that the facility can be molded to meet the museum’s needs.

Announcement of the new interim site comes after a lengthy search that originally focused on the area around John Wayne Airport. The Aliso Viejo location is within a mile of the museum’s planned permanent location, a 25-acre site in the new Aliso-Woods Canyon Regional Park. The museum’s permanent home is probably at least five years away from construction.

The museum may begin some outdoor programs in Aliso-Woods Canyon as soon as the interim site is open, concentrating on the ecology of Aliso Creek and on the Pectin Reef fossil area. All that is needed is a parking area for school buses.

Varner said the museum hopes to open satellite sites in other areas of the county and may maintain a small presence in the present Newport Beach location--at least until the county opens a planned nature center in the new Upper Newport Bay Regional Park. Previously scheduled summer programs will continue.

But meanwhile, the main emphasis will be on getting the new interim site open. “We’re hitting the ground running, so to speak,” Varner said.