"Animals are living artwork no man can reproduce."
- E. J. Frick, Founder/Director, Sunset Zoo
They say that when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. Well, if life gives a city a plot of land to build a cemetery on, but the ground is too stony to actually dig graves... build a zoo? That's what the city of Manhattan, Kansas did in 1933 when the land it purchased to build the Sunset Cemetery instead began its life as the Sunset Zoo. It's a relatively modest-sized zoo, as one would expect from a fairly small town, but not a crowded one - exhibits are spaced out in a large park let setting, giving visitors chances to wander and loose themselves between the animals.
The zoo is loosely broken into a series of geographic area, the first of which is Africa. Black-and-white colobus and chimpanzees have an outdoor exhibit each attached to a small primate building. The outdoor exhibits are decently sized, though I feel that each could benefit from more vertical complexity in the way of climbing structures. The indoor space was a bit on the dingy side, a little cramped and darker than I would have liked to see. The trail then meanders down to a pair of large, open yards for two African predators, cheetahs and spotted hyenas. These yards I though were excellent, very spacious and with considerable depth (many cheetah exhibits I see are long and thin, which I feel like doesn't give the cats sufficient space to get back from visitors). The hyenas especially struck me as very personable, and I've never been closer to one than I was at Sunset (perhaps a little too personable - there was signage at the front of the exhibit telling visitors not to bother the hyenas, so I suspect that if I were there on a busier day, I might have seen/heard kids running the front of the exhibit or whooping at the hyenas.
Australia was represented with a walk-through wallaby exhibit, where red-necked and parma wallabies hop across the path. Emus are confined to a side yard. There is a small but very attractive walk-through aviary, with visitors confined to one side overlooking a small billabong patrolled by black swans. Kookaburra, straw-necked ibis, and rarely-exhibited silver gulls can also be seen here.
A second walk-in aviary marks the start of the South American section, housed American flamingos. Not that I ever see them fly, but I do always appreciate seeing flamingos in covered aviaries instead of being in open pens and flight restricted. At the very least, it allows them to be outdoors 24/7, safe from nocturnal predators. A path loops around another pond, home to black-necked swans and crested screamers, with a side-pen for red-footed tortoise. Titi monkeys, poison dart frogs, and a boa constrictor occupy a small building nearby. The monkeys have an adjacent outdoor enclosure.
The entrance to the Kansas Plains is marked by a large exhibit of prairie dog, turkey vulture, and box turtle. It didn't have nearly as many prairie dogs as I often see in zoo prairie dog towns, which might explain why this exhibit actually had grass.
As it happens, that's all I was able to see of the Kansas Plains. The remainder of that exhibit (along with part of South America, the part with the largest animals - giant anteater, maned wolf, and Chacoan peccary) was closed due to construction. The zoo is in the finishing up its new Expedition Asia, which will bring a mixture of new and old favorite animals back to the zoo - sloth bears, tigers, Amur leopard, red panda, lar gibbon, and small-clawed otters among them - when it opens later this year. It's the first step in a masterplan which will almost completely re-invent the zoo, brining in many new species and greatly expanding some habitats. A reptile house will hopefully be included, as the zoo has almost no reptiles, amphibians, fish, or invertebrates on display.
I was sorry that my trip timing didn't coincide with the opening of Asia. Still, this was my first new zoo in nearly a year, so I was just glad to be there. I had not expected to see such an excellent little zoo in this little university down. Sunset is definitely worth keeping an eye on as it grows and rebuilds itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment