- We are not a typical zoo.

We're more of an education center and a nature center.

We have a special treat today.

This is Bianca.

She is a North American porcupine, and not only that, she's also an albino porcupine, meaning she was born without any pigment in her skin.

Her fur is white, her quills are white, and her eyes are actually pink because there's no coloration in her irises.

- [Anil] Production funding for "Upstate Attractions" is provided by Franklin County Development.

(lighthearted music) Allegany County.

(lighthearted music) Oswego County Tourism.

(lighthearted music) And the Watkins Glen Chamber of Commerce.

(lighthearted music) With daily flights to Boston Logan International Airport, Massena, New York offers access to locations, such as the Adirondack Mountains, the St.

Lawrence River, and destinations in Canada like Ottawa and Montreal.

Online at fishmassenany.com.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (lighthearted music) In this episode of "Upstate Attractions," we take you to explore the beautiful Adirondack Frontier, with its majestic foothills and peaks, to a hidden gem, found near Tupper Lake, in Franklin County, in Northeastern New York, a region noted for its exceptionally rare ecosystem and the perfect location for an award-winning Education Center that examines new ways where people and nature can thrive in the same place.

- Right now, we're standing at The Wild Center in the Great Hall.

And you can see behind me the Great Hall.

You can see our wonderful granite slabs that are illustrative of our mountains.

The Adirondacks were formed by the glaciers in the last Ice Age.

And the granite slabs represent the mountains of the Adirondacks.

Behind me, you can see our Greenleaf Pond.

The Greenleaf Pond is actually a man-made pond.

This site used to be a farm; first it was woods, then it was a farm, then it was a sand pit.

And so when The Wild Center was built in 2006, it opened in 2006, a couple of years before that, the pond was created.

And you'll notice that the pond level is at eye level.

So when you walk in, it's sort of above the floor and it makes... We hope, our visitors stop, take a pause, and take a look at what's happening outside, because we've got lots of stories to tell about the nature, the animals, and the people that live here.

(lighthearted music) - [Anil] The Wild Center has won numerous awards, from Innovative building design and construction, to tourism excellence, to youth climate program recognition, to National Top 10 and Finalist Museum Awards.

That said, it was difficult to nail down a definitive description of just what The Wild Center actually is.

(Leah chuckling) - I have worked here since the very beginning, a couple of months before the museum started.

And I have been working this whole time, all these years, to sort of describe what The Wild Center is.

We're sort of a zooquarium, museum.

We're sort of all of those things combined.

we have live animals.

We have aquarium fish and turtles.

We do a lot of climate work.

We do all kinds of stuff.

So it's really hard to sort of nail down what The Wild Center is.

But at best, I think that we are a gateway to the Adirondacks.

If you want to come here and learn what the Adirondack Park is, we're really a center to help you understand what's here., and hopefully take that information back to where you live and understand the natural world a little better, even where you're from.

- So here at The Wild Center, we believe that there's a number of on-ramps for people to create a passion for nature.

For some folks, it is animals, like the work that Leah and her team do.

For some people, it's the hands-on exhibits.

For other folks, it's some of the programs that we do here.

So maybe it is one of the large festivals that we do, where we bring in live music and food trucks, and provide an opportunity for people to get outside and do maybe something different than they're used to.

For others, it's a program like Wild Lights, where in the winter time, we stay open late and we string the entire campus with lights.

And it's an opportunity to get outside with family and just to enjoy the forest being all lit up in a totally different experience than what you're ever going to see anywhere else in the Adirondacks.

For some folks, it's things like Birdly, which is a VR experience that mixes technology and nature.

For others, it's forest music, which is an art installation here, where we take a relatively unremarkable quarter-mile loop here in our old Pine Forest, and we line both sides with speakers and we compose special music for that trail to create an immersive experience.

So that's another example of how we mix nature and art.

So we believe there's a number of different pathways for folks to get inspired around here.

- I'm the school programs coordinator here, so I work directly with K-12 education and getting students engaged with our campus.

We're education-driven.

There's a lot of things that we do to draw students in and get them hands-on with the different things that we offer, whether it's seeing a creature feature and learning about the local animals in our ecosystem, or engaging with a program that we offer on campus for students, which might involve curriculum standards that get them engaged in hands-on.

But we also want to provide an experience that is fun because you can absolutely give students a ton of facts and information.

It's not gonna drive home for them unless they have an experience built around that.

So, that's really what we're trying to do.

- The Wild Center is a different kind of museum.

We're a one part nature center, one part museum, one part community center, one part art center.

We like to be a center for all things that matter to this region.

- [Anil] So how did an education center with such a local focus become one of America's top-ranked museums?

More so, how did this hidden gem become so significant when it's in the middle of a 6-million-acre state park located in the massif of mountains with over 100 peaks and 200 named lakes?

- One of our greatest assets and one of our biggest challenges is our location.

We are indeed in the middle of what some people consider nowhere.

Other people consider at home.

So for some people, we're right in their own backyard, but really thinking about the location of The Wild Center en masse, dead on center of the Adirondack Park, a 6-million-acre area that's both private and public lands, is kind of amazing.

So, we have this multi-million-dollar, state-of-the-art Museum Science Center in the middle of Tupper Lake, New York.

We are happy that we're in the middle of Tupper Lake, New York, but we're not on Long Island or in Northern New Jersey.

We're not just a half an hour from Montreal.

We are literally very far from a lot of people.

However, that's an asset to us because that allows us access to the natural beauty and the ecology that is really useful for everyone, no matter where they live.

We feel like if you can visit The Wild Center, you'll not only experience the Adirondacks and what we have to offer, but also have a better perspective on what's in your own backyard.

There's nature everywhere.

- I'm very fortunate.

I tell people I live in one of the most beautiful places in the entire world.

So, to get to share that with people is really rewarding.

So I think if you can sit down with folks, regardless of whether they are familiar with the Adirondacks, or Northern New York, or they aren't at all.

Just by showing them some of the beautiful scenery that we are lucky enough to have here, people grasp onto that.

So, yeah, to share the beautiful scenery, to share some of the work that we're doing here at The Wild Center that we're super proud of, that's the rewarding part and the most fun part is to kind of shine a light on this area.

(lighthearted music) - [Anil] True to its mission statement and its humble beginnings deep in the wilderness of one of America's great natural environments, The Wild Center began as an idea, a discussion amongst friends at co-founder Betsy Lowe's Long Lake Cabin over 20 years ago.

- In 1999, there were a series of natural weather events that happened to the region.

One was an ice storm, and that ice storm created a lot of havoc in our region.

And then we had a microburst in July, and that microburst was basically a mini-tornado, and it did a tremendous amount of damage, and people really wanted to understand what was going on, what was happening.

And so there's a need that The Wild Center idea was hoping to fill, the need to understand the natural history, the science behind the scenery, if you will.

So, Betsy Lowe collaborated with our second additional founder, which is Obie Clifford.

Obie Clifford and Betsy partnered to co-found The Wild Center.

- It seemed like a long shot in the beginning, I will tell you, but it actually... The fact that it actually came about in 2006 is still just a magical, wonderful thing.

So my uncle, Don Clifford, normally known as Obie Clifford, and got a lot of people excited.

He was on the board of the Natural History Museum in Manhattan.

It got a lot of other outside interests in this idea of building a museum, really specifically to connect people with nature.

- [Hillarie] Going back to the beginning, The Wild Center was definitely a public-private partnership.

The Wild Center was funded with lots of generous donations from people in the community, seasonal residents of the community, and even New York State and the federal government gave some competitive grant monies, as well as some wonderful startup money for The Wild Center to come to be.

Knowing that our goal from the start was threefold, we called it the 3Es, the Environment, Education, and the Economy.

Those three aspects of what this place could do for our region have always been really a primary focus, and we have always considered our impact and how we can help the community sustainably grow and thrive.

- [Anil] Okay, so let's explore the 3Es and check out how the award-winning Wild Center is fulfilling their goals.

First, the environment.

- [Hillarie] We're always looking for different ways of helping people connect with nature.

People are part of nature, that's one of our big stories.

And as part of nature, it's important for us to be comfortable and different.

- Our animal ambassadors are coworkers, and I am not just being facetious when I say that.

They have an important job to do.

They're helping teach thousands of visitors that come to us every year about the animals that call the Adirondack Park home and also about animals in general, so people can learn how cool nature is.

And it doesn't have to be here in the Adirondack Park.

It can be right outside your window or your front door.

And the majority of our animal ambassadors came to us through wildlife rehabilitation.

Most of them have physical injuries that would prevent them from surviving very well in the wild.

We have birds with wing injuries, we have some animals that have vision problems.

Some of them have been hit by cars or things like that.

So, we're able to give those animals homes, and at the same time, we're able to sort of reach lots of people on a daily basis and help teach them about those animals in their natural history.

- [Clifford] In 2015, we reached a point where we thought, "This needs to be a place where people want to come on a sunny day, on a bad day.

It's not just an indoor experience."

And this is when Wild Walk was conceived and born.

- Yeah, so right now, we're standing on top of Wild Walk.

It's an award-winning experience here at The Wild Center that opened in 2015.

It's meant to give visitors a different kind of perspective on nature, get you up off of the ground, and get a bird's-eye view of the Adirondack Forest.

So the idea for an observation area has always been in the works.

Even when they started to think about The Wild Center conceptually back in 1999.

Now, originally, it was just a single bird tower that you could climb up into and get a view, but slowly but surely, that idea evolved.

So Chip Reay, the architect of The Wild Center, also designed this spot that we're standing on now.

So it starts at the ground floor of the forest and goes 40 feet above the trees to really give you a panoramic view.

- So outside of just Wild Walk, we've always had trails going around the campus, which has actually expanded now to 116 acres, I believe.

And this trail goes down to the river, the Raquette River, which flows through The Wild Center campus, and it's where we also offer canoe trips so people can paddle with a naturalist and really understand the ecosystem of the river.

(ambient music) (birds chirping) You can hear right now the sound of the music coming from Music Forest, which was actually started in 2017.

It was as an immersive sound experience in the woods.

And I think the most important thing is at The Wild Center, the philosophy is we will... Like, we want to connect you to nature in any way that we possibly can.

And even if through art, through music, obviously through science.

But this was an amazing way of really appreciating the woods in a very different way by hearing the music within it.

And it has been an extraordinary success.

- [Anil] As you've seen, the Wild Center provides multiple ways to experience nature and to explore the environment of the Adirondacks.

(people chattering) Getting back to the 3Es, the approach to education seems to have the same omnilateral approach.

(people chattering) - The Wild Center approaches education in a number of different ways, but mostly from the informal education perspective that many museums use.

So we understand that when you approach informal education or museum education, you need to take into consideration different ways of learning.

Some people learn from labels, some people learn from listening, some people learn from interaction.

So we like to provide a variety of these types or ways of learning pedagogy in the technical term.

We like to provide a variety of different styles so that people can access the information where they are.

We like to say that there are on-ramps to understanding this information, and if an on-ramp is coming to see sparkling lights in the middle of winter in the snow, and that opens your mind to wanting to know more about that forest, great.

If they're on-ramp to learning more about what our habitats for our animals look like is watching our otters play around in their enclosure, great.

So whatever on-ramps get people to think in more depth about our topics, which are climate change, the Adirondacks, trees, animals, and human interaction with those things, that's all the better.

- [Anil] Okay, so one of the on-ramps for our crew was to find out more about Bianca, the albino porcupine.

(bright music) - [Crew] Here she comes.

- Oh, you're coming out on your own?

Good girl.

You can do it.

Come right out here.

Obviously, she's very cute.

So people always wanna see her and learn about her, and she's a really interesting way for people to sort of come closer and wanna understand more about porcupines because she's so interesting and unusual.

- [Producer] Can you give us a little lesson on the quilling?

- Yes, absolutely.

So it's hard to tell on Bianca here, but she has about 30,000 quills in her body.

They start at the top of their head and go down their back down their tails.

Those quills are really... They're basically their armor.

They don't see very well, they're not the fastest animals out there, so in order to escape predators, they have this body armor.

When they feel threatened, they do a few things.

They'll shatter their teeth, it makes a clicking noise, that's a warning.

They can all those quills straight up and then they'll turn their back to whatever is threatening them with all those quills raised up, and they'll start flicking their tail back and forth.

And if it's a dog, or a coyote, or whatever it might be, if they come too close, they either get hit by that tail or they're gonna get a big face full of quills.

(bright music) (Leah chucking) I have never been quilled from our porcupines themselves.

They do shed, just like a pet sheds or even our hair sheds.

There's been a few times over the years where I've been cleaning up their habitats and accidentally got a quill when I've been doing that.

And it feels a bit like being poked with a needle.

I wouldn't recommend it.

- So, we are very deliberate here at The Wild Center to make each and every one of your experiences either educational or drawn to nature in some way.

And one of the ways that we do that is through what we call our third place, which makes up our store and our cafe.

So an example of that is an author that's featured in the store, we will bring in to speak to visitors about the subject matter that they're writing about.

So maybe it's the Adirondack High Peaks, or maybe it's sustainable gardening.

So they come in, they chat with visitors, they provide an opportunity to go a little bit deeper on some of the subject matter.

So, it creates an extra educational experience here.

We also want people to just come and relax, right?

Grab a children's book or a stuffed animal, and sit on the couch, and just enjoy with your family, or come grab a cup of coffee in the morning.

We want locals and folks in this community to feel like this is their place as well.

- The Wild Center really wants to help people understand the science behind the scenery, but we wanna do it in such a way where we're not lecturing at people, where we're understanding that every visitor comes here with a certain amount of their own knowledge.

Some have a tremendous amount of knowledge about our subject matter, some don't know much at all but might have experiences.

We've tried to create an environment here at The Wild Center where conversations can start, where you can see exhibits, and you can see what's outside, and look at it, and learn a little bit about it through our programs and our interpretive labels, our projects, and our activities, so that we can learn from our visitors and our visitors can learn from the basis of science that we present as a science museum.

So, as a science museum, you'll notice around all of the exhibits we do have labels.

Some labels are very technical Latin terms, but not usually because we don't want to take the position of too much the expert because we understand there are many experts in this world.

We're presenting the science, we're letting people access that science, and then bring their own experiences to it so that everyone can feel part of this place.

(bright music) - [Anil] One of the collective and local learning opportunities at The Wild Center is that the Adirondack Region is an exhibit unto itself.

In fact, in this day of carbon credits and environmental stewardship, researchers have noted that the Adirondacks are a unique ecosystem and a carbon sink.

- Carbon sink is a place where carbon is sequestered.

We are emitting a lot of carbon to the atmosphere as human beings.

These trees that you see around us, grasses, everything else, they take them in and they store them in their roots and in the ground.

To really get an understanding of this really ancient region, which has 6 million acres, a massive, beautiful, preserved area of natural beauty.

The Wild Center is at the center of the Adirondack Park, which is one of the bigger carbon sinks.

(bright music) - So behind me is an art-based exhibit.

So you can see that it's made out of a moss and it shows the blue line of the Adirondacks.

So what we were trying to signify is using natural tools, like moss that we gathered around our campus, and show that it's a carbon sink, that we provide a lot of resources to help fight climate change here in the Adirondacks.

- [Nick] The newest exhibit here at The Wild Center is the Climate Solutions.

It opened in July of 2022, and really that's a storytelling exhibit, where we highlight locals here in the North Country and the work that they're doing in their own lives, in their own fields of work in terms of Climate Solutions.

It could be anything from food and farming, to education, to science, to home building, and really everything in between.

So, that's one of the first physical manifestations of the climate work that we do here.

Right, we've been holding youth climate summits for a long time, but that Climate Solutions exhibit is one of the first times that we've actually shown people that work in exhibit form.

(bright music) - All of these different sections, whether it's taking action, or climate change, or rebuilding and transforming our energy ecosystems, it's all about taking small solutions into your daily lives without having to completely transform anything.

It's the small steps that you can take.

Rebuilding our food systems.

So that's all on changing what we eat, thinking about our meals and where we get them from, and what happens to them after we're done with our meal.

So whether that's composting, or sustainable farming, or eating seasonally, that's all what that part of the Solutions exhibit is about.

The Tinkering Studio is my favorite part.

(Tori chuckling) This is where students can get engaged and learn how to build some of these topics that we discuss, whether it's taking our wind turbines so they can learn how to create wind energy by building pennies that are allowed to roll up and they can use the wind to energize that.

Or rebuilding an animal's home and learning how to make it sturdy enough to survive all these extreme weather events.

We engage with the local schools really well.

So, whether that's in with our science coordinator in our local Tupper Lake School District, but also we work with the art teachers as well.

- [Anil] Getting back to the 3Es again.

Number three, the economy.

The local community is a key component of the genesis and the ongoing success of this Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks.

- One of the biggest things that we strive for here is to be a community driver, to be an anchor for the Tupper Lake community, right?

Not only do we wanna bring in visitors to explore this part of New York state, right, and get embedded, and go shop on Park Street and Tupper Lake, but we also want to be that anchor for the community to feel like it's their place, right?

You have work, and you have home, and you have school, but you also have The Wild Center.

So we want people to feel like this is theirs as well.

So, it's something that we're proud of and something that we're constantly striving for.

(lighthearted music) - [Anil] Beyond being an award-winning tactile education and nature center, The Wild Center's digital initiatives aim to present the natural wonders of the Adirondacks to a global audience.

- [Nick] We're always trying to be on the leading edge of technology, so we're experimenting with a number of things right now.

If you're located on the West Coast or anywhere around the world, there's still an opportunity to learn about some of the things that The Wild Center talks about, regardless of whether you could step through our doors or not.

- [Anil] Remote visitors can stay connected to the Adirondacks, no matter where they live.

Accessing live cameras that showcase the wildlife and natural surroundings of The Wild Center, or by exploring science through the Nature Lab and Lunchtime Live video series and activities, or by taking a virtual field trip and visit The Wild Content Hub for student-centered interactive resources.

- It's one of the goals here that that we have is to spread the mission of The Wild Center, regardless of whether you're here in the Adirondacks or anywhere in your own backyard.

- [Anil] Locally focused and internationally recognized, The Wild Center in Tupper Lake, New York is a true hidden gem.

(lighthearted music) Join us next time when we take you through the North Country to discover another special location, another upstate attraction.

Production funding for "Upstate Attractions" is provided by Franklin County Development.

(lighthearted music) Allegany County.

(lighthearted music) Oswego County Tourism.

(lighthearted music) And the Watkins Glen Chamber of Commerce.

(lighthearted music) With daily flights to Boston Logan International Airport, Massena, New York offers access to locations, such as the Adirondack Mountains, the St.

Lawrence River, and destinations in Canada like Ottawa and Montreal.

Online at fishmassenany.com.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (lighthearted music)