CLEVELAND — Our Home for the Holiday’s series looks at how our cultural organizations are celebrating “CircleFest” this year at University Circle.
The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is providing programming about some special animals. Not those famous eight tiny reindeer, but snakes, turtles, and more with their own fascinating story. And a 70 foot-long dinosaur called Happy.
“The museum plans on celebrating the holidays this year a little differently. A lot of our programming is going to be virtual,” said Allison Grazia the Manager of Public Engagement at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
“One of our newest digital offering is our DiscoverE programming. Some of our upcoming topics include discussions with local breweries about fermentation, as well as fire ecology which is really important to a lot of land within Northeast Ohio.”
For a full list of DiscoverE topics, click here.
The newest exhibit to the museum is Wildlife Rescue, Miracle in Conservation.
“This particular live animal exhibit focuses on conservation and rescue stories in the wild. Animals that have been pulled back from the brink of extinction. We get to meet a ton of animals,” said Delivis Niedzialek, a biologist with the traveling exhibit.
While holding a boa constrictor Niedzialak went on to say, “Here also have a ton of space to properly social distant people. All the interactive components of the exhibit we are doing touch-free.
This exhibit is here for about the next 7 months, so well into 2021. If you follow us on social media, we are going to be posting pictures, doing live feeds, there are a lot of ways to interact with us without actually physically stepping through the doors.”
The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has reduced hours due to the pandemic. They are open on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
“Happy the Helper is our unofficial, yet official mascot that we have for our “Happy for the Holidays” campaign. Happy is our Haplocanthosaurus Delfsi dinosaur,” said Grazia.
“What we want is to encourage kids to write digital letters to Happy telling him about what their hopes and dreams are for the future and for the museum. And then they will receive a letter back in the mail, after the holidays, from Happy himself. We want to see what our community is hoping for in the future, for the next 100 years for the museum. We feel it totally embraces the museum's mission to explore, engage, and empower for tomorrow.”