Jurong Bird Park's Bird Discovery Centre Is An Avian Living Classroom

By Isabel Cheng

Singapore - How do birds command mastery of the sky? Can an ostrich egg support the weight of an adult human? Of what use are feathers? Find these answers and more at the launch of Jurong Bird Park’s Bird Discovery Centre.

Open since January this year, the Bird Discovery Centre features twelve different displays on the fascinating and colourful world of birds. At this living classroom, come face to face with the now-extinct elephant bird which, at 2.6 metres in height, towers over a full-grown man. While feasting your eyes on a must-see collection of eggs featuring more than 250 different bird species, you will also get the chance to peek into the various stages of a bird’s life from an embryo to an egg to a full-grown adult.

“The new Bird Discovery Centre is an amalgamation of fun, education and life, where there is always something new to learn for visitors of all ages. With the Bird Discovery Centre, Wildlife Reserves Singapore hopes to enrich the public with invaluable avian knowledge and inculcate appreciation for their conservation,” said Ms Fanny Lai, Group CEO, Wildlife Reserves Singapore.

The Bird Discovery Centre also features an interactive classroom which serves as an enrichment asset for students to increase their knowledge of the avian world in an interactive and fun way through educational tours, camps and classes.

To aid the teachers in facilitating visits to the Jurong Bird Park and their classroom lessons, the Teachers Network has collaborated with the Bird Park for the development of teachers through an attachment programme lasting from one week to ten weeks. Teachers on attachment have a chance to assist and even conduct enrichment lessons, camps and volunteer programmes at the many activities around Jurong Bird Park as well as the Bird Discovery Centre, and being a part of these activities adds another dimension of fun and interactivity to classroom lessons.

The Bird Discovery Centre will be an invaluable asset for Singaporeans and tourists to marvel at birds and their uniqueness and for budding ornithologists to learn even more about the avian world.

About Jurong Bird Park
Opened in 1971, Jurong Bird Park is the largest bird park in the world, offering a 20.2-hectare hillside haven for 8,000 birds representing 600 species. Its Heliconia Repository, with 108 heliconia species and cultivars in its collection, is one of the largest in the region. With key attractions such as the Bird Discovery Centre, African Waterfall Aviary, Lory Loft Aviary, Southeast Asian Birds Aviary and the award-winning African Wetlands, the Bird Park attracted close to 900,000 visitors in 2008.

Committed towards conservation, the Bird Park is the first in the world to breed the Twelve-wired Bird of Paradise in captivity and received the Breeders’ Award from the American Pheasant and Waterfowl Society in 2001.

In 2006, the Bird Park became the recipient of the Conservation & Research Award for the Oriental Pied Hornbill Conservation Project by IV International Symposium on Breeding Birds in Captivity (ISBBC). In Asia, Jurong Bird Park is the only park in the Asia Pacific to have an Avian Hospital. It has a Breeding and Research Centre tasked to ensure the welfare, breeding and promulgation of birdlife and is also an Official Rescue Avian Centre.