Woodland Park Zoo to Open New Forest Trailhead exhibit

 

Angela Lim

Seattle Times features reporter

Just past Woodland Park Zoo’s west entrance, guests can be found strolling through a canopy path in the treetops at the new Forest Trailhead, catching a glimpse of tree kangaroos and a red panda.

The trailhead builds on the zoo’s Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program, which started in 1996 to protect the Matschie’s tree kangaroo population. The program works with communities in Papua New Guinea to save one of the last intact cloud forests in the world, according to the organization.

Home to various forest animal species, the zoo’s exhibit will open to the public May 1, with members getting early access April 28-30. The Forest Trailhead, which has a two-story, fully accessible space, will operate year-round from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, according to the zoo. Access to the facility is included in zoo admission or membership.

A red panda sits in a tree at the new Forest Trailhead in Woodland Park Zoo on Friday. In addition to the tree kangaroos and a red panda, visitors can view kea parrots from New Zealand and nearly 20 species... (Kevin Clark / The Seattle Times)

“There (are) over 40 staff members in Papua New Guinea that are sharing in the celebration of this exhibit that links Woodland Park Zoo across the world, across the Pacific, to the forests and communities of Papua New Guinea,” said Lisa Dabek, a senior director of the program and a senior conservation scientist with Woodland Park Zoo, during a media preview Friday.

Through the exhibit, guests can see tree kangaroos at the zoo for the first time in 10 years, as well as learn more about the global movement to restore forests and the species that live in them. In addition to the tree kangaroos and a red panda, visitors can view kea parrots from New Zealand and nearly 20 species of reptiles, amphibians and fish, according to the zoo. The new building spans 12,000 square feet and has 1 acre of outside habitat, said president and CEO Alejandro Grajal on Friday.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson looks over the exhibits in the new Forest Trailhead pavilion at Woodland Park Zoo on Friday. “The city holds this land, and the zoo brings it to life. And together, it becomes... (Kevin Clark / The Seattle Times)

“The Forest Trailhead is an exhibit that is composed of three core elements: the forest that sustains us, all the communities that protect those forests and the animals that bring us together,” Grajal said.

The project — which had a budget of $40 million — was largely supported by Forests For All, a campaign by the zoo to aid its initiatives preventing deforestation, habitat loss and other effects of climate change. The Forest Trailhead received financial contributions from over 100,000 individuals, Grajal said in his remarks Friday.

The new Forest Trailhead pavilion at Woodland Park Zoo on Friday. As guests wander the pavilion, they can find information on how to get involved in forest conservation efforts and see art by Indigenous... (Kevin Clark / The Seattle Times)

Planning for the exhibit began in 2021, said Rebecca Whitham, chief engagement officer at Woodland Park Zoo. Designed by Seattle-based LMN Architects and built by Sellen Construction, the Forest Trailhead offers an interactive and multisensory experience for visitors. In the exhibit, visitors can whiff scents of coffee and vanilla, reminding them of products in their daily lives that originate from forests and now deforested areas, Whitham said.

“Forests are nature’s best solution to climate change. They are the reason we have clean soil and clean air,” Whitham said. “It’s not just about the trees and the animals who live in them, but it’s this whole connected system that we are a part of, which also means we’ve got a role to play.”

On the building’s lower level, endangered species such as the red rainbowfish, blue-speckled tree monitor lizard and keeled box turtle are displayed. Zoogoers can also speak with keepers taking care of the animals on the treetop canopy level, Whitham said.

As guests wander the pavilion, they can find information on how to get involved in forest conservation efforts and see art by Indigenous artists that honor their cultural heritage. One of those pieces is a vertical metal installation and interior mural by Lummi Nation/Nooksack artist Jason LaClair, who used Coast Salish art forms to express stewardship for the Earth.

At the ribbon cutting of the Forest Trailhead on Friday, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said the project has been a longtime collaboration between the city’s Parks department and the zoo that is “rooted in a shared commitment to community conservation, discovery and public access.”

 

 

How Bruce the Parrot Landed Atop the Pecking Order, Without a Beak!!

 

Carl Zimmer - NY Times 20 April 2026

"In 2021, a disabled parrot named Bruce made headlines worldwide for creating his own prosthetic beak. He didn’t stop there: Scientists reported on Monday that Bruce has now become the alpha male of his group.

And he did it by learning to joust.

The new research, published in Current Biology, is an important addition to a small but growing number of observations that demonstrate just how resilient animals with disabilities can be, said Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna who was not involved in the study.

“The link between innovation and disability in animals is important and completely understudied,” she said.

Bruce is a 13-year-old kea, a species found only in New Zealand. These seagull-size parrots live together in groups, known as circuses, that can number in the dozens.

 

Keas were viewed as pests until the past few decades, because they sometimes attack sheep when their regular food supply runs short. As recently as the 1980s, the New Zealand government paid bounties for dead keas, helping to drive down their numbers to fewer than 5,000.

The bounties are gone, but keas still face grave threats. The curious birds get injured trying to steal food from rat traps, for example. That’s what scientists suspect happened to Bruce when he was a youngster. When they discovered him in the wild, his entire top beak had been snapped off.

Bruce’s injury amounted to a severe disability. Keas use their long, hooked top beaks to preen, keeping their plumage clean and free of dangerous parasites. The birds also dig with their beaks for seeds and other food on the forest floor.

“Losing it would likely make basic survival in the wild very difficult,” said Dr. Auersperg.

The researchers brought Bruce to the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, where he joined a dozen other keas living in captivity. As he grew up, scientists visited his circus to study the birds’ intelligence.

 

The keas proved to be curious problem-solvers. And they seemed to have fun along the way.

“They’re so playful all the time,” said Alex Taylor, the director of the Animal Minds Lab at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. “They want to play with your shoelaces, they want to steal your pens.”

Dr. Taylor once watched two keas land on a floating log. Together, they figured out how to turn it into a seesaw. Fun.

Bruce eagerly tried to join the scientists’ experiments. But without a top beak, he struggled with simple tasks like pulling a string.

But the parrot found another way to impress. In 2021, the researchers noticed that he regularly picked up a pebble, holding it between his tongue and lower beak and then pushing it through his plumage.

 

Image

Credit...Alex Grabham

 

After watching this puzzling routine a number of times, the researchers realized that Bruce had invented a new way to clean his feathers.

 

It was a trick Bruce apparently came up with on his own. None of the other keas at the reserve used pebbles to preen, and the behavior had never been observed before in the species.

Last year, Bruce delivered a second surprise.

Male keas fight for dominance. Those who lose fall to the bottom of the circus hierarchy, and they experience stress as a result. The alpha male ends up with the lowest stress levels.

To measure the stress among the nine male keas at the reserve, Dr. Taylor and his colleagues analyzed certain hormones in their blood. Much to their surprise, the male kea with the lowest levels was Bruce.

“We never expected him to be right at the top of the males,” said Alexander Grabham, a zoologist at the University of Canterbury and an author of the study.

The surprise prompted Dr. Grabham and his colleagues to look more closely. Reviewing videos, they discovered that Bruce had risen to the top with a new style of kea combat. 

 

Male keas typically bite one another around the neck. Bruce can’t bite; instead, he has learned to joust. He rushes his opponents and slams his lower beak into their bodies.

Jousting proved a clever strategy. Bruce consistently won his fights, and the other males deferred to him. One perk of becoming the alpha male: Bruce got to visit the bird feeders first.

“Nobody ever tried to jump him or displace him,” Dr. Grabham said.

After enjoying a meal, Bruce permits lower-ranked males to preen his feathers and clean his bottom beak. “And when Bruce is done, he’ll give a kick or a little joust to say, ‘Right, that’s it, I’m done,’” said Dr. Grabham. “That to me is a sign of dominance.”

There are some questions about Bruce’s ascension that will be impossible to answer. For instance, Dr. Grabham and his colleagues can’t say when Bruce figured out how to joust and become the new alpha.

“We haven’t been tracking his dominance and stress over the last 12 years to know the journey that he’s been on,” Dr. Taylor said. “We weren’t really looking for it, so we didn’t really join the dots.”

Sarah Turner, a primatologist at Concordia University in Montreal who was not involved in the study, said research on other species supports the idea that animals with disabilities sometimes come up with innovative ways to stay alive, and to thrive.

In Dr. Turner’s own research, she has observed that Japanese macaques with deformed hands will learn how to walk bipedally instead of on all fours. And males with disabilities seem to fit easily into the social hierarchy, sometimes reaching the top ranks.

Humans are responsible for many of the disabilities in animals, Dr. Turner said — from congenital malformations caused by pollution to injuries caused by traps, electrocution and road accidents.

Scientists need to learn more about how animals adapt to disability, she added, as humans put more pressure on the animal kingdom: “The world is a living lab now.” 

One More Thing You Never Want to Say!!!

 

In Defense of Dumb Dogs

 

Emily Anthes is a science reporter, writing primarily about animal health and science. She also covered the coronavirus pandemic.

" Earlier this year, I wrote about dogs with an unusual talent. Although many dogs can master basic commands, these animals had amassed enormous vocabularies, learning the names of hundreds of toys. It was, the story noted, a rare skill in the canine kingdom; in years of searching the globe, scientists had identified very few of these “gifted word learners.”

And yet, as soon as the story was published, I began to hear from readers who said that their dogs were linguistic prodigies, too. And while a few of the dogs did indeed sound gifted, it seemed statistically unlikely that they all were. Many sounded as if they were perfectly normal dogs, who had learned to recognize a handful of words that mattered to them, like “walk” or “dinner.”

As the emails streamed in, I began to wonder whether I was witnessing a canine version of the better-than-average effect, a cognitive bias in which people tend to overestimate their own abilities, and those of their loved ones, relative to those of other people. (It is also sometimes known as the Lake Wobegon effect, named after Garrison Keillor’s fictional town where “all the children are above average.”)

It wouldn’t be surprising if the same bias extended to our dogs, given how many of us consider our pets to be full-fledged family members. But it is a remarkable shift from just a few decades ago, when even scientists viewed dogs as too simple-minded to be interesting subjects of study.

That assumption turned out to be staggeringly wrong, of course. Research now reveals that dogs are capable of all kinds of sophisticated cognitive feats. They excel at reading human social cues like pointing gestures and gaze direction, for example, and can make logical inferences about the world. They seem to have a basic grasp on object permanence, or the understanding that items don’t disappear when they are out of sight. They may also possess a rudimentary theory of mind: the awareness that other individuals might have perspectives and knowledge that differ from their own.

Although it’s impossible to make direct comparisons between the overall intelligence of dogs and children (toddlers can do lots of things that dogs cannot, and vice versa), scientists have noted that some canine cognitive skills put dogs roughly on par with children between 1 and 3 years old. That message has gotten out — and taken on a life of its own.

In a 2013 study, for instance, nearly half of dog owners ranked the mental capacities of dogs as equivalent to those of 3- to 5-year-old children. More than 20 percent of respondents rated dogs even higher; more than 5 percent reported that dogs had mental abilities on par with those of someone who was at least 16 years old. Intriguingly, the researchers found, people who felt more emotionally close to their own dogs tended to give higher ratings to the cognitive abilities of all dogs.

A handful of small studies also indicate that people do tend to rate their own dogs more favorably than the “average” dog on a variety of positive traits, such as loyalty, friendliness and intelligence. In a 2025 YouGov survey, two-thirds of dog owners said that their animals were smarter than the average dog. Just 6 percent rated their dogs as possessing below-average intelligence.

Statistically speaking, of course, many of us must be sharing our lives with dogs who fall on the slower end of the spectrum. I’m delighted to be one of them. If I had sheep to herd, I would absolutely want a whip-smart dog. But I don’t, and I don’t. And intelligence strikes me as an overrated trait for a family pet. Smart pets can be enormously challenging, requiring a lot of enrichment and becoming bored (and, sometimes, destructive) when they don’t get it.

Take my cat Juniper. (Please!) She’s the smartest of my three pets and also, hands down, the most demanding. She solves food puzzles so fast that they provide only the briefest of distractions, and we have to rotate her toys with frustrating frequency. My husband and I are constantly trying to meet her need for novelty, rearranging our furniture into ad hoc feline forts and carrying her around the apartment while holding her at different angles and heights. (She seems to love being upside down.) And when she does, inevitably, get bored, she opens our drawers, shreds our toilet paper and pushes our dishes off the kitchen counter.

Lazing at the other end of the spectrum is Watson, our dog, who has never displayed any particular cognitive gifts. He seems befuddled by pointing; when we drop food on the floor, we often have to personally escort him to it. And while we’ve kept the same daily schedule for a decade, he doesn’t always seem to have a firm grasp on it. Commands? He used to be able to sit. Sort of. These days, his vocabulary doesn’t extend much beyond “treat.”

But does it need to? Perhaps the word-learning dogs impress us because vocabulary size is a trait that maps neatly onto human intelligence. There are many ways to be smart, though, and word learning probably isn’t the most relevant skill for most dogs.

After all, Watson seems to have all the abilities he needs to thrive in his highly specialized ecological niche. He can sniff out the dog food in a stack of otherwise identical Amazon packages and is highly attuned to the sounds of modern cooking appliances. (It took him about two days to learn to recognize the telltale beep of the air fryer.) He knows that when I change out of sweatpants, I’m getting ready to leave the apartment — and that if I also walk toward the closet where we keep his travel crate, it means he’s coming with me. And he is, if I may, an absolute street-snacking savant. (An abandoned pizza crust hates to see him coming.)

More important, Watson is everything we could want in a dog: sweet, gentle, goofy, loving. I don’t need him to help me with the crossword — I just want him to curl up next to me while I do it. And at this, he excels.

Indeed, what makes dogs exceptional is their ability to forge these relationships with us — bonds so strong that we are all somehow convinced that our own canine companions lead the collective pack. Watson might not know his hedgehog toy from his stuffed turtle, but he is — and I say this with all due journalistic objectivity — the absolute best."