The Springs Preserve: Comparing Exhibit Styles

They say that you always need to know your competition, right? When it comes to museum work, maybe it is more appropriate to say that, like any great artist, you can gain inspiration from looking at the work of others. Whichever way you want to spin it, today Stacy and I headed over to the Springs Preserve next door to check out their exhibits.  

Despite the fact that I drive straight past it every time I go to the museum, I have never been to the Springs Preserve. All we had to do was flash our museum badges and we were in. Being a student, free access into anything is exciting – really.

If you haven’t been to the Springs Preserve before, you really need to go! They have so many fun things to do both for children and adults alike. The main exhibit that we went to “check out” was their new exhibit on venomous snakes, Envenomators: The Venomous Snakes of North America

I really enjoyed the way that they constructed the display cases. All of them had little flaps - that I will admit reminded me of toilet seat covers - that had trivia about snakes. Ranging from true and false to multiple choice, they offered a hands-on way for the public to “interact” with the exhibits. They were not only educational but fun to try and guess the answers to the questions. Several other highlights included seeing a live rattlesnake, some videos of snakes and last but not least a giant metal snake that you could crawl inside of. 

After checking out our competition, we spent the remainder of the afternoon, enjoying their outdoor display cases and animals exhibits. Designed like rock formations, they created animal enclosures that look like they are built into the rocks. They had quite an extensive collection of animals from ants to scorpions, tortoises to foxes. Seeing at it was oh, around 90-100 degrees on the day that we went, many of the animals were hiding in their holes. Something that I particularly liked about their exhibits is that they inserted a glass panel into the animal's’ “hide-outs” so you could sneak a peek at them even when they were trying to beat the heat! The San Diego Zoo could probably learn a thing or two from the Springs Preserve.