Established in 1889 on one hundred sixty-three acres of Rock Creek Park, the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park is one of the oldest zoos in the United States.
The zoo was founded largely through the efforts of William Temple Hornaday, a naturalist who was alarmed by the rapid disappearance of the American bison from the Great Plains. By 1888, the bison had been hunted from an estimated thirty million animals to fewer than one thousand survivors. Hornaday brought a small herd to Washington — first to display on the Mall, then to this permanent zoo — and they became the nucleus of a successful breeding program. The national bison population today numbers around five hundred thousand, largely because of conservation efforts that began here.
For five decades, pandas have been a diplomatic gift from China. The first two, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, arrived in 1972 following Nixon's historic opening to China, in the first gesture of what became known as Panda Diplomacy. They were immediately the most visited animals in any zoo in America.
The zoo's residents have also included Smokey Bear himself — the actual bear cub rescued from a 1950 New Mexico wildfire who became the symbol of the Forest Service's fire prevention campaign — and who lived here until his death in 1976.
The zoo sits in a forested valley. Rock Creek Park, which surrounds it, is one of the largest urban parks in America — more than a thousand acres of old-growth forest in the middle of a major capital city.