Lindsay Wildlife Experience

1931 1st Avenue, Walnut Creek, California 94597

Lindsay Wildlife Experience is a family museum and wildlife rehabilitation center in Walnut Creek, California, formerly known as the Lindsay Wildlife Museum. In the San Francisco East Bay Area, Lindsay is the first wildlife hospital built in the United States and a famous family museum. Created in Walnut Creek in 1955, the programs of the museum "connect people with wildlife to promote responsibility and appreciation for the environment we share." The museum includes a variety of displays of California wildlife, specimens of natural history, and a special theater that provides a glimpse into one of the many care rooms for wildlife in the hospital. More than 5,000 wounded, sick, or orphaned wild animals are treated each year by the rehabilitation center, which is still among the largest in the world.

History

The Lindsay Wildlife Museum was established as the Diablo Junior Museum by Alexander Lindsay in 1955. After Alexander Lindsay died at 44, it became the Alexander Lindsay Junior Museum in 1962. He relocated to a water pump house in Walnut Creek's Larkey Park in 1965. The museum initiated the first organized rehabilitation program for wildlife in the United States in 1970. The City of Walnut Creek ceased operations in 1986 and the museum became a non-profit organization managed independently. The designation was dropped from "Junior" the next year, making it the Lindsay Museum.

The museum relocated to a 28,000-square-foot (2,600 m2) newly built museum near the old pump house in 1993. Three years later, the Lindsay Wildlife Museum was renamed. In the last few years, has added a number of big new displays to the museum. Behind the Scenes Wildlife Hospital allows visitors through a wide, one-way window to see a live veterinary procedure at the hospital. At Raptors, visitors will practically fly over Mount Diablo and weigh their arm span against the wingspans of raptors. At the Alive Hive! Visitors to Honey Bees and Beekeepers at Work will watch thousands of live bees and their queen and learn what various bees do in their jobs. The museum opened the new The Burrow exhibit in fall 2013, where visitors can go underground to explore the wildlife world beneath their feet. In 2015, the museum changed its name to Lindsay Wildlife Experience.

Animal Ambassadors

Specializing in the treatment of animals unable to return to the wild, Lindsay Wildlife Experience. Almost all of the 70 animals that call Lindsay Wildlife home have a physical, emotional , or behavioral condition that would render them unable to live in the wild. As animal ambassadors, all the animals that reside at Lindsay Wildlife Experience represent and inform the public on conservation and natural history. Some animals are on public view; others live off show and are taken out for lectures , workshops, tours, and private animal encounters.