Following nearly a decade of planning, the Avian Propagation Center (APC) opened at the Zoo on June 18, 1980. It was planned and built with the input of colleagues from many facilities around the country, and was designed with four separate areas. One is the incubator building, where egg receiving and recording, incubation, egg preparation, and hatching take place. Another is the brooder house, where chicks grow and develop under the watchful eyes of the keepers (in the building center in this photo); when they outgrow this space, they move to the larger brooder pens where they complete their development (to the left in the photo). A fourth area is the 40 breeding enclosures for breeding adult birds or housing delicate species, with an additional 19 of these enclosures located on the roof of the brooder building (seen here on top of the brooder house).