Continuing yesterday's tour of the Kansas City Zoo, we follow the trail to the zoo's enormous African area, one of the most complete displays of African wildlife of any zoo in the US.
The exhibit starts off with the largest of African mammals, the African bush elephant. The four-and-a-half acre elephant exhibit stretches for a quarter of a mile, with the holding barn at one end and a deep swimming pool at the other. It is segregated into sections so that it can be blocked off for introductions or breeding access or opened up into one large habitat. The habitat is long and thin, which keeps the elephants in sight easily, though I do prefer exhibits with more depth. No one was in the pool on the day of my visit, but I can imagine that it would be a very cool experience watching the elephants bathe from the stadium seating that faces the waterfall-fed pool. Fun fact: in 2019, two of the elephants temporarily escaped by scaling a wall, which must be a first for elephants in a zoo.
The remainder of Africa is accessed by crossing a long footbridge over a river, after which visitors enter the concessions and gift shop complex. Africa is ostensibly broken into five countries - the elephant exhibit being "Botswana," but considering that three of the five countries - Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda - are adjacent to each other with similar wildlife, and that occasional inaccurate animals pop up in regions where they wouldn't be found, we'll ignore that. The distinction isn't harped upon too much in the layout, anyway. The more important divide is that between the dominant East Africa section and the much smaller West African.
The trail loops around a very large central grassland yard, grazed by scimitar-horned oryx, addax, springbok, and common eland, among other antelopes (the first two species being North African desert dwellers, the third a South African native - a fair bit of geographic muddying that so many zoos are guilty of). The exhibit is very attractive and can be seen from many vantage points, including a covered porch looking out over a waterway. The exhibit has surprisingly few animals for its size, which I assume to be an attempt to keep it from being overgrazed, and it is a pretty verdant yard.
Along the trail, visitors pass a number of stand-alone exhibits featuring such East African zoo staples as cheetah and warthog. Birds are well represented, with standalone exhibits for saddle-billed stork and southern ground hornbill, aviaries for lappet-faced vulture, white-necked raven, and bateleur eagle, and a small walk-through aviary with hamerkop, marbled teal, and lilac-breasted roller among the denizens. The birds that enchanted me the most were the smallest in the exhibit, the diminutive Taveta golden weavers which were cheerfully building their intricate nests on all sides of the walkway. Side-exhibits attached to the main aviary house silvery-cheeked hornbills and red-ruffed lemurs (if the zoo was determined to do different countries, they might at least have made Madagascar one).
Other African exhibits along the loop include lions (a bachelor pride of neutered males, which results in their having scruffy little manes), black rhinoceros, and Nile hippopotamus (the later, unfortunately, without the underwater viewing that makes them such spectacular exhibits, though the pair on exhibit were very active when I was there). Giraffes and plains zebras have exhibits adjacent to the main antelope yard. There is also an abundance of smaller mammals - blue duiker, bat-eared and fennec foxes, rock hyrax, and three species of small cat: caracal, sand cat, and black-footed cat. Reptiles are not especially well-represented on the trail. There are a few tortoise species, including gigantic Aldabras, as well as a small building with an exhibit of slender-snouted crocodiles which, to be frank, was the least impressive exhibit in all of Africa, in terms of size, complexity, and attractiveness.
Just before the hippos and crocodiles, a path spurs off that visitors not paying attention might miss. That would be their loss, because the chimpanzee exhibit at the end of that path is the crown jewel of the zoo, almost hands down the finest chimp exhibit I've ever seen. It's enormous, nearly the size of the elephant exhibit, with sloping, lush hillsides and towering live trees which the chimps clamber up (this might have been the first time I saw chimpanzees in real, live trees). Visitors can watch from an overview, or enter a research station (filled with the kinds of hands-on interactive devices that I love) and watch the chimps through giant windows. No less an authority than Jane Goodall described this as one of the finest chimpanzee habitats she ever saw; before reading that she said that, my main thought was, "This must be what it's like to see chimps at Gombe."
Outside the chimp exhibit is one of two loading stations for an cable-car sky ride, which carries visitors back to the entrance of Africa, passing over the main antelope exhibit. You can purchase a one-way or two-way ride. I always forget that I'm afraid of heights until I'm in the middle of doing something that brings me up high, but I did enjoy it, if only for the perspective of just how huge the zoo is. The rest of East Africa consists of an exhibit of African wild dogs (a fairly so-so exhibit) and an excellent, very entertaining, very attractive habitat of Guinea baboons, a species that you don't see very often in US zoos (it was only the second time I've seen them ever). There is also a boat ride which allows visitors to see the antelope and other hoofstock from a different perspective, but that was not running on the day of my visit, presumably due to COVID restrictions.
Compared to East Africa, West Africa is a very short walk. It is (appropriately) in a much more forested section of the zoo, accessed from a bridge that branches off the main East African path, not far from the entrance. Visitors can see two species of mangabey monkey, bongos, red river hogs, and leopard (the Amur subspecies standing in for the African, as often happens in US zoos). The leopard exhibit is of the design where half is on either side of the exhibit, connected by an overhead bridge (the exhibit seemed a little small, and I wonder if it would have worked better to have one larger exhibit than two smaller ones). Absent from the trail are many of the usual stars of West African rainforest exhibits in zoos - okapi, mandrill, pygmy hippo. There are gorillas, however, in a large, shaded habitat that, if not as stunning as the chimpanzee exhibit, is still very nice. Like the chimps, the gorillas can be seen either from an overlook or through viewing windows.
Kansas City Zoo has grown enormously over recent years, and its new aquarium, with sea otters slated to be the stars, promises to be another jewel in its crown. The collection is somewhat uneven - the mammal collection is very impressive, bird collection so-so, reptile and amphibian collection very small. Much of the zoo is relatively new (Africa, for example, which doubled the size of the zoo, opened only in 1995), so there is very little that is outdated in the facility. Some of the habitats they've opened - kangaroo, chimpanzee, penguin - have been spectacular (and not just star animals - the tree kangaroo exhibit was fantastic, and I thought the lappet-faced vulture aviary was the best I had seen for that species). In other cases, it seems like in the rush to grow and develop, other exhibit have been tacked on more as boilerplate, lacking the vision and ambition that the zoo has shown in others. I hope that, as Kansas City Zoo continues to grow, that the same attention to excellence is lavished on all new additions.
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