Continuing the visit to Battle Creek's Binder Park Zoo, we leave the East Zoo behind and enter Wild Africa.
Wild Africa can be accessed through one of two methods. Visitors may either take a tram, which runs continuously, or may take a walk of about fifteen minutes through the woods (the trail is well marked and runs alongside the tram road, so there's no fear of getting lost). The concept of an established zoo having a large, newer African area tacked on and separated from the main zoo by a short distance is, interestingly, one that I have also seen at least twice before, at the Dallas and Kansas City Zoos.
The African area is stylized as a fictitious "Zuri National Park," - having a fictitious location, of course, can help explain away that many of the animals found in this exhibit complex are from different parts of Africa and would not cohabit. Visitors approach the exhibit by entering through a visitor center that resembles a village serving as the park headquarters (again reminiscent of Kansas City). As is often the case, the structures here double-function by housing the visitor service facilities, such as the restaurant and gift shop. Other buildings feature educational displays about the animals to be seen along the trail, along with other African wildlife. I actually found the theming here to be some of the more realistic I'd ever encountered in a zoo, and in the dusty clearing with crates, landrovers, and faded posters tacked to walls, I was reminded of my first visit to Africa long ago.
The showstopper of Wild Africa is the savannah, an 18-acre grassland that dominates the horizon. A good balance was struck with the stocking of the exhibit. There is a large variety of species - I counted four species of antelope on my visit, along with zebras, ostrich, marabou stork, and cinereous vulture - and most of the species were maintained in small herds, rather than a pair or trio as one often sees in zoos. At the same time, the yard was also sufficiently large that it was able to retain grass. The savannah yard is no real rival to the field exhibits of the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, but it is a fair-sight more impressive than the dusty paddock that one often sees billed as an African savannah in zoos. The stars of the yard are, as they usually are, the giraffes, and in keeping with what's popular in zoos, there's the inevitable giraffe feeding station where visitors can meet the world's tallest land mammals at eye-level and offer treats.
The remainder of Africa is a walking path of about a mile (for a zoo with a relatively small collection, you sure get your walking in here) that loops through woodlands, meandering among several exhibits. It was a slow start, and I was a little disappointed initially. The first exhibit I saw was a massive, meshed-in enclosure, that seemed to hold nothing by a single blue duiker (looking back, I realize that I was visiting during one of the many recent periods of concern about avian influenza, so I suspect that this was normally an aviary and the birds had been pulled). This was followed, and my experience improved, by an excellent habitat for red river hogs, perhaps the most spacious that I'd seen, as well as a large muddy yard for Aldabra tortoises (this fictitious African park apparently holding desert antelope from the Sahel, such as addax, wild pigs from the rainforests, and tortoises from islands far out in the Indian Ocean). Primates were represented by two exhibits, one a dynamic mixed habitat of black-and-white colobus and black crested mangabeys, the other of red-capped mangabeys, both very good exhibits, with mangabeys being a group of monkeys I don't see too often anymore.
Of course, no African area is complete without at least a few of the large carnivores, and Binder Park delivers. Visitors can climb into an old school bus and peer out the windows into the habitat of the lions. It's a cool idea, but the viewing from the bus wasn't actually the best because of the wire fencing in the way - much better viewing was to be had through ground-level viewing windows nearby. Nearby, African wild dogs can be found. The nest of the carnivores habitats, in my opinion, was the cheetah exhibit down the trail. Cheetah exhibits are often long and narrow, meant to encourage running and keep the cats in view. This was a spacious, deep habitat, which also had the advantage of being built onto a hill and having some height to it. From the top of their habitat, the cheetahs would have had a commanding view of the savannah across the trail.
The trail circles back to the entry plaza, where the tram or trail await to take visitors back to the East Zoo. Tucked behind the savannah is a tented campsite for adventurous overnight guests.
Binder Park was an interesting facility of highly variable quality. The collection, while containing many popular species, was still somewhat generic to me, and seemed to have several holes, especially in the lackluster bird and herp collections, while perhaps being a bit too heavily biased towards large carnivores. Exhibits ranged from very impressive, especially in Wild Africa, to simply adequate, such as the lemur and owl exhibits in the East Zoo. It also just didn't seem to fit together - the highly themed, well-designed Wild Africa, with the children's zoo banality of East Zoo, with North America being somewhat intermediate in quality. I hope that the zoo continues to build on their success with the African expansion and reimagines East Zoo - it's not a bad zoo by any stretch, but as the African area shows, it has the potential to really be so much more extraordinary.
A final word to anyone planning a trip - this zoo is closed for about half of the year, so if it's on your list of zoos to see, make sure to plan accordingly!
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