A cacophonous symphony of squawks, chirps and tweets erupts from the southwest corner of Liberty Park on a sunny afternoon in Salt Lake City.

Inside the grounds of Tracy Aviary, the oldest free-standing aviary in the United States, visitors ooh and ahh at a colorful cast of feathered characters: the southern ground hornbill with its guttural screech and long eyelashes, cooing kookaburras perched in bare branches, showy peacocks lounging in the shade of sprawling shrubbery. Three bright pink spoonbills soar overhead with legs outstretched, and snow-white swans paddle gracefully about a pond.

Even amongst all the exotic stimuli, the real head-turner remains Andy N.       Condor the Andean condor, who can regularly be spotted strolling sidewalks alongside aviary pedestrians.

A truly prehistoric-looking creature, Andy pads along with his wrinkled head and massive talons like a tiny dinosaur, though by bird standards, he’s anything but tiny. He stands taller than the average toddler, but when visiting with children as he often does, he’s met with delight rather than horror. Where else can one find a real-life dinosaur, just looking to say a casual hello?

A local zoo turned private collection turned full-blown aviary, Tracy is known for its immersive ability to facilitate up close and personal interactions with birds – a sector of the animal kingdom with which most folks aren’t exactly accustomed to coming nose to beak.

Andy has found a longtime friend in Helen Dishaw, Tracy Aviary’s curator of bird programs, who has been working with him for the past 11 years. It was Dishaw who suggested Andy be given the opportunity to break from his confines – which are rather luxurious for a condor – to mingle with crowds, recognizing almost immediately his easy-going, amiable demeanor.

“Within just a few weeks of working here and seeing how the other keepers could work around him, I was like, ‘Boy, he’s a laid-back dude,’ ” Dishaw said. “He’s just naturally very genial and kind of chill.”

One might wonder how on earth it could be possible to train a full-grown condor to socialize with toddlers. According to Dishaw, who has been studying behavioral science and working with animals for most of her life, the journey from feral to friendly has a lot to do with building trust and understanding the ways birds have evolved to communicate.

“Once you learn to read the birds’ body language, you can have a two-way conversation,” she said. “I mean, I’m not talking to them, I’m not Doctor Dolittle, but you do have a conversation with them.”

Dishaw refers to herself as an “animal teacher” rather than trainer. She describes the relationship as circular: The animals teach her as much as she teaches them.

Andy is an “ambassador bird” at Tracy Aviary, representing his species with the hope of generating genuine interest in conserving condors in the wild. She explains with palpable passion that conservation is, indeed, the name of the game, calling Andy the “king of the ambassadors.” Condors are a type of vulture, an animal many people respond to with visceral revulsion. When Dishaw hears people report that Andy’s affable personality has changed their minds about vultures, it is music to her ears.

Conservation is one of Tracy Aviary’s driving missions – preserving the natural habitats of the birds whose unique aesthetic and behavioral displays are relished every day by visitors from around the world. The aviary’s Director of Conservation Cooper Farr notes that while the impacts of their work are felt globally, a large portion of their efforts go toward conserving living ecosystems right here in Utah.

The aviary develops both local and regional projects focused on important habitats or specific conservation issues like urban development or water rerouting. Farr and her colleagues gather local volunteers who are interested in birds and train them to conduct scientific surveys. The resulting information is then provided to partners like The Nature Conservancy and city nonprofits, which use the community-supplied data to carry out the grassroots work necessary to make tangible changes.

Farr can think of multiple occasions on which the information volunteers collected made a real difference for threatened bird populations. She recalls one particular project along the Jordan River – an important habitat for birds, as it is a key migration path that provides water, vegetation and food sources. At one site, an infrastructure project proposed the addition of a pond, changing how water flowed into the river. Tracy Aviary’s conservation team had been monitoring the area, and their survey data provided proof of nesting swallows at the intended site. The project was pushed to the following year after the birds had safely migrated home, effectively rescuing an entire avian community.

Another notable conservation project the aviary works on is the Lights Out Salt Lake initiative, which encourages local homes and commercial buildings to turn off their lights and draw their blinds between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., March through May.

Much like moths to a porch light, birds that migrate at night are drawn to areas with dense light pollution, causing disorientation. Birds can’t perceive glass, which makes them ill-suited for a nighttime jaunt through the streets of downtown Salt Lake City. Up to a billion birds die in the United States each year from collisions with windows, with many of these incidents occurring during migration season. Farr reports that more than 750 people have committed to joining the program, and they’re just getting warmed up.

Tracy Aviary’s mission is so entwined with protection and restoration efforts that $1 from every admission ticket sold goes toward its conservation projects.

“Often you’ll hear of zoos with ‘quarters for conservation’ programs – these giant zoos with way bigger budgets than the aviary,” Farr said. “We do a dollar. We’re really putting our money where our mouth is.”

Money certainly isn’t a given in the business of birds. Tracy Aviary has always strived to provide its residents with the highest quality digs, but funds haven’t always been plentiful. However, with his background in the nonprofit sector, it was nothing President and CEO Tim Brown couldn’t handle when he signed on to the Tracy team in 2004.

At the time, the aviary was hurting. Just over a year after Brown started, the aviary got denied accreditation from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums for having facilities that just didn’t meet modern zoological standards.

“Can you imagine owning a house for 30 years and not investing in upkeep? It would fall apart,” Brown said. “As a community, we turned our back on the facility. We had not been investing in it.” Losing accreditation was the best thing that could have happened, he said, because it put a spotlight on the problems that needed to be addressed.

After securing community support for a bond that would fund a complete renovation worth tens of millions of dollars, the facility visitors see today is virtually a brand new aviary. How, though, did Tracy Aviary end up in such a state of disrepair in the first place?

The story begins in 1911, when Salt Lake City’s first zoo was built where the aviary now stands in Liberty Park. In 1932, the zoo relocated to its current location near Emigration Canyon, leaving a nearly empty plot of land in its stead. At that time, banker Russell Lord Tracy was amassing quite the personal bird collection, finally donating it to the city in 1938. His birds found convenient housing in some of the old zoo’s leftover cages, and Tracy Aviary was born. Tracy helped kickstart the new Liberty Park staple by providing funding and hiring its first superintendent. As time went on, however, the quality of the aviary’s facilities began to decline as money ran out.

“Our entrance used to be … well, there’s some discussion about whether it was a garage or a barn,” Brown said. The aviary converted it into a gift shop. There were no administrative offices, save for the one office next to the sewer pipes that blew out once in a while. “The rest of us had our offices in a dilapidated trailer. Sixteen of us were in there. It was horrible. We had no money.”

Tracy Aviary is a tale of transformation. These days, its enclosures are pristine; its structures are chic; its landscaping is indescribably lush. Walking through the aviary’s current Treasures of the Rainforest exhibit, guests are swept away to a humid paradise teeming with tropical life: creeping philodendrons, rare Guam kingfishers and a dazzling array of other winged creatures that are so elaborately colored, they hardly seem real.

The aviary has a knack for exciting the senses, whether the environment be a curated simulation or real, in-the-flesh Utah. A back-to-nature philosophy drives the aviary’s landscape-focused layout, which doubles as a botanical garden. One of the more popular areas among children is called Fallen Logs, and it offers just that: big logs on their sides where kids can climb and jump.

Tracy Aviary is hoping to complement its existing passion for natural Utah environments with its new Jordan River Nature Center, located in South Salt Lake. It doesn’t boast an extensive bird collection, focusing instead on providing landscapes and opportunities for play in nature. Its vegetation is largely drought tolerant, native and ideal for attracting birds and pollinators. One of its more unique, kid-friendly features is a “mud kitchen” play area.

When asked if the new facility will attempt to mimic the ecology of the Jordan River, Brown brings up a complicated truth. The existing Jordan ecosystem is entirely different than it was 100 years ago, largely due to development, climate change and other human-induced factors. Where there used to be meandering streams, creeks that flooded in the spring and beaver dams, there is now a canal. Former animal residents of the area are not necessarily suited to live there now.

With all this in mind, the ultimate goal of the Jordan River Nature Center is to bring as much unfettered wilderness to Salt Lake City as is presently possible. By the end of 2023, it is projected to cover 12 acres, though the nature center itself already opened to the public as a work in progress in 2020.

Brown discusses his hopes and dreams for this new project with the wide-eyed spirit of a real steward of the land. It’s clear he loves the work he does at the aviary, despite the sometimes dramatic ups and downs the facility has weathered. Even the lowest lows are never completely without humor. He reminisces on calls from neighbors reporting peacocks on their roofs, and the incident of the escaped blue-crowned motmot. With inspectors crawling the grounds during their post-renovation reaccreditation, the staff scrambled to locate their escapee, careful not to incite panic or indicate that anything had gone awry.

Rogue birds aside, it all worked out, as it always does when you’re wielding the tried-and-true ingredients of success: a mission that matters and a group of passionate people committed to fulfilling it. Through its interactive bird shows, conservation projects, nature play exhibits and more, Tracy Aviary is determined to bring its community closer to nature. And with an Andean condor walking around, one might argue there’s no such thing as too close.