A friend and I are planning a trip to Pittsburgh for the fall, we're going primarily to visit the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (the two of us are working on a zine/art book about taxidermy and the museum has an exhibit about the art of taxidermy, so it'll be good research for us). We're also both zoo nerds, and we'll probably try to visit at least one zoological facility. The trip will probably only be Friday-Sunday and the museum may take up a full day alone. If we have to choose between the National Aviary and Pittsburgh Zoo which would more people recommend? What are the highlight species at each facility? The Aviary does a good job of listing their animals but the Zoo's website is terrible and didn't give us much information. Would it be possible to do both in one day?
Of the two I’d definitely recommend the Zoo, I visited recently and while it’s not one of the best zoos in the USA, it’s still a solid 3-4 hour zoo with a great aquarium, some interesting new exhibits and the only Elephant Seal in a zoo in North America. The aviary is nice but small, I did the whole thing in an hour but even if you’re a huge bird fan it’s a 2 hour visit at most. Another thing you could do is combine the zoo and aviary into one day, I did this option, and since the two places are only a 15 minute drive from each other, you can do it pretty comfortably. Anyways, hope you enjoy your visit! The Carnegie museum is great, and there’s lots to do in Pittsburgh.
I agree. It is very easy to combine the aviary with the zoo, which I did in July. The zoo hardly has any birds (pretty much just 2 species of penguins, ostriches, flamingos, and 1 species of hornbill), so the aviary compliments the collection nicely. Besides the elephant seals, the zoo has sea otters and Stuhlmann's blue guenons (only a few US zoos have the species, and it appears to be absent from Europe). The zooinstitutes.com site has up-to-date list of species for both the zoo and the aviary (as of July this year).
