Illuminating Animals: Zoolights
Nocturnal animals come out to play during the popular ZooLights
When Bob Lamb joined the staff at the National Zoo eight years ago, he noticed that the park was “pretty quiet” post-Halloween.
His solution? Start a forward-thinking holiday lights program with Pepco as lead sponsor. “We agreed that the lighting ought to be LEDs — which were brand new at the time — because of our conservation orientation and theirs,” Lamb says. And after a few years, and the addition of more sponsors, ZooLights became a free nightly event. “When we did that, attendance quickly doubled and tripled,” says Lamb, executive director of Friends of the National Zoo, the nonprofit arm in charge of administering every aspect of the Smithsonian’s zoological park — except direct care of the animals.
Every year the zoo adds more lights and events to ZooLights, which now covers the full expanse of the park and includes slides and train rides as well as the signature trees and sculptures decorated in often-dancing, multicolor lights — 500,000 in total. This year sees a new laser light show set to music and projected onto the zoo’s largest building, the Elephant Community Center.
“It really becomes a new season for the zoo,” Lamb says, “and brings in thousands of people.” Make that hundreds of thousands — last year’s ZooLights attracted 180,000 visitors, a good portion of whom had previously never been to the zoo at night. Many of the park’s heated animal houses are open, as are shops, restaurants and food carts where patrons can buy festive food and drinks, from caramel corn to hot cocoa with a shot of peppermint schnapps.
Most of the park’s animals aren’t bothered by the event, and some, including the elephants, seem to “really love having people in to see them at night.” But the pandas, which can be hard to see even by day, are totally off-limits by night. “One of our major environmental goals is to help species like pandas survive,” Lamb says, “so we purposely dim the lights in that area.”
Why? Successful breeding over the last two years has proven one scientific finding: These bears like to do it in the dark.
ZooLights runs nightly from 5 to 9 p.m. through Jan. 1 (except Dec. 24, 25 and 31) at the National Zoo, 3001 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. Call 202-633-4800 or visit nationalzoo.si.edu.
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