Each of the displays at the Beaver Creek Wildlife Education Center has been developed on a theme. The themes are located in separate rooms. The themes include a mixed late winter though early summer wetland, a summer deciduous forest, a winter deciduous forest, and a fall upland grassland.

Mixed Wetland Display

This display contains two Canada geese, two blue phase snow geese, thirty three ducks, some as flying mounts and others standing mounts, a common loon, and a small variety of shore birds and other water birds.

This display allows visitors to see some of the birds who visit our lakes, ponds, streams, and marshes in our area as they migrate through in March or even nest in spring and early summer.

Summer Deciduous Forest Display:

This display contains 18 mounted fish, 21 mammal mounts, and 41 bird mounts. Although certainly not a complete coverage of all of the animals that live in our mixed deciduous forests, these 80 animals give a good representative coverage of our woodland animals. For most of our visitors, this is the first time for them to see a black bear or a barred owl up close. We also have an 80 gallon aquarium with live fish found in the Little Beaver Creek as well as live box turtles and red eared sliders in this display area.

Winter Deciduous Forest Display:

This is our newest display and is our first attempt to develop a winter display of any kind. It certainly has been a challenge and we are grateful for the help of Gregg Henning, of Henning Wildlife Art, and Todd Metz, the regional naturalist supervisor for Ohio State Parks, as well as all the time and effort of our volunteers group.

This display contains some of the animals found in our local mixed deciduous forests in the winter as well as a few stragglers from other parts of the country who actually would not be here. These include two Snowy Owls, a Great Gray Owl, a Boreal Owl, a Saw-whet Owl, a Long-eared Owl, Screech owls, Barred owl, and a Great-horned Owl. There are other winter birds in the display along with a porcupine, Coyote, Bobcat, Gray Squirrel, Fox Squirrel, Red Squirrel, and other mammals.

Fall Upland Grassland Display:

This display contains animals that are often the easiest to see in the winter here in our area. We concentrate primarily on birds in this display although it does contain Red Fox, Eastern Cottontail, Eastern Mole, Least Shrew, Star-nosed Mole, Woodchuck, and Opossum. Birds include a Short-eared Owl, Northern Harrier, Sharp-shinned Hawk, Rough-legged Hawk, Red-tailed Hawk, Red-winged Blackbird, Eastern Meadowlark, Eastern Bluebird, American Kestrel, Wild Turkey, Ring-necked Pheasant, Bob-white Quail, and other grassland birds.

Although out of place geographically, we have added a western plains bird, the Golden Eagle. Our visitors are amazed at the size of this wonderful bird.

In addition to our theme displays, we have a room dedicated to our live native snakes. We always have a Black-rat Snake and an Eastern Milk Snake. We usually have a Eastern Garter Snake and a Northern Water Snake. We are always on the look out for other local snakes to display. All of the snakes that we keep for over one month are PIT tagged as per the ODNR regulations. We do not PIT tag a snake until we know that it will eat for us and can be maintained by us. If there is any doubt, we release it within the 30 day limit set by ODNR.

We also have two display cases in the live animal room that contain our egg collection, birds not found in our local area, our skull collection, and other interesting items. The egg collection contains eggs from well over 100 species of birds including Rook eggs, several sea bird eggs, eggs from England and Scotland, eggs from the western United States, as well as local eggs. The skull collection is primarily skulls of mammals and we hope to grow this collection in the near future.

The bird mounts found in this room include a Clark’s Nutcracker, Gray-breasted Jay, Black-billed Magpie, Rufous-capped Motmot, Chestnut-headed Oropendola, Ringed Turtle Dove, Lesser Prairie Chicken, Rock Ptarmigan, Sage Grouse, and Reeves Pheasant.

A display case at the end of a hallway includes some of our most cherished mounts. They are an immature Bald Eagle, a Peregrine Falcon, Osprey, and our best bird in many ways, a Passenger Pigeon.

As we have done over the past eight years, we will continue to change our displays over time and will search for the most interesting and educational ways to meet our mission which is to educate students and adults about wildlife in our area. We welcome additional mounts as well as expert advice on how better to display our collection of animals.