Rena Ashton

Boise Weekly › August 19, 2009

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Summary

Rena Ashton loves the wild side of life. As Zoo Boise's educational director for the last seven years, it's Ashton's job to help bring the wonder of the animal kingdom to the public with special programs. Since she began as a volunteer in 1995, Ashton has seen the zoo undergo some major changes. Now, as it prepares to break ground on its most ambitious project yet, the "Out of Africa" exhibit, Ashton sat down with Boise Weekly to talk about life at the zoo.

One thing is the zoo, for a long time, hadn't undergone any improvements. So since 1994, the zoo has undergone about $3 million worth of improvements. Those are things that some visitors can see directly in the animal exhibits, making the animal exhibits more naturalistic, but also a lot of infrastructure, like sewer lines going bad, electrical needed to be replaced, so a lot of things that visitors don't see. It's an old zoo, it's been here a long time. The other direction is, in the past in zoos, it's always been the more animals you have, the better. But now the focus, especially for us with a smaller budget, is to have fewer animals, but better spaces for those animals.

This is the biggest project to date. It's called "Out of Africa," and the feature animals will be lions, giraffes, rock hy'raxes -which is the closest living animal to the elephant we have on earth today, but they're about the size of a large guinea pig-weaver birds, and a lot of other interactives for kids to play on. The difference is, again, we're including more of the human element, so when you walk into this exhibit you'll actually walk into the middle of an African village. All the buildings will be themed as an African village, with the savannah surrounding you, so you'll have to kind of go on the outskirts of the village to look into the animal exhibits.

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Rena Ashton

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