Toronto Zoo is a zoo located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Around 1880, businessman Harry L Piper established a Zoological and Acclimatization Society (also as Toronto Zoological Garden) and opened a zoological garden. In 1888, the Riverdale Zoo opened in Toronto, as a typical example of a zoo during this time, with animals displayed as curiosities in dark cages and cramped enclosures. Animals from Piper's zoo moved to this site. In 1963, a private citizen's brief to build a new zoo was introduced by Hugh Crothers to the Chairman of the Council of the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, William Allen. Allen asked Crothers to head up a committee to investigate the feasibility of a new zoo. By 1966, a group of eleven people became The Metro Toronto Zoological Society with Crothers as the first chairman
Jean Théodore Delacour was an American ornithologist and aviculturalist of French origin. He was renowned for not only discovering but also rearing some of the rarest birds in the world. He established very successful aviaries twice in his life, stocked with birds from around the world, including those that he obtained on expeditions to Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. His first aviary in Villers-Bretonneux was destroyed in the First World War, and the second one that he established at Clères was destroyed in the Second World War. He moved to the United States of America where he worked on avian systematics and was one of the founders of the International Committee for Bird Protection (later BirdLife International). One of the birds he discovered was the imperial pheasant, later identified as a hybrid between the Vietnamese pheasant and the silver pheasant