Continuing yesterday's tour of the Topeka Zoo & Conservation Center, we'll look at some of the new additions to the zoo.
When Gary Clarke, the longtime director of Topeka, left his position, he didn't exactly retire. Instead, he started his own African safari business, which he called Camp Cowabunga. That name and theme formed the basis for the new African area at the Topeka Zoo, which opened in 2018. It's smaller than many zoo African exhibits, but its safari-camp style makes for excellent viewing, and what animals it does have, it does well. Passing through a plaza that houses some enormous dung beetle sculpture, which make for perfect photo ops, visitors pass by an exhibit of patas monkeys, long-legged savannah primates that run as well as they climb. The exhibit sits on either side of the path, with an overhead passage linking the two halves, offering visitors a chance to watch monkeys clamber overhead. Children, however, will probably prefer to watch the monkeys from inside a land rover when appears to have crashed into the side of the exhibit, the monkeys frequently perching on the hood. The monkeys share their habitat with dikdik, leopard tortoise, and helmeted guineafowl.
A nearby safari base camp building is the headquarters of Camp Cowabunga, complete with a replica of Clarke's office, a hippo skull perched precariously on the desk, books overflowing from the shelves. Floor to ceiling windows provide excellent views of two of Africa's big social carnivores, the lion and the African wild dog. Additional viewing for each species is outside. Camp Cowabunga is expected to expand in the near future, as construction on a new habitat for giraffe, antelope, and ostrich is taking place at this time, which will see the giraffes relocated from the Animals and Man building.
Down the path from Camp Cowabunga is a set of densely-planted habitats for Sumatran tigers. Nearby, outside the Tropical Rianforest, is a feeding aviary for lorikeets.
A third big cat species - the puma - is seen in Kansas Carnivores, a sprawling series of exhibits at the other end of the zoo. Next to the pumas is a kind of so-so habitat for North American river otters - not bad, but lacking underwater viewing and perhaps a bit plain. Additional native wildlife can be found nearby in the form of a pronghorn exhibit (shared with wild turkeys), a lagoon for trumpeter swans (which does a good job of attracting other native waterfowl), and a tail flight cage for golden eagles. Perhaps the best exhibit in the zoo is Hill's Black Bear Woods, an excellent, spacious, heavily planted yard (and I know it can be tough to keep plants with bears) that houses American black bears. The bears can be observed from the ground level through windows in a viewing building or from the roof of the building. Signage in there about humans living with bears is great. The only thing I didn't like about the exhibit - and this is an issue with the zoo as a whole - is the background. The zoo is small and, though adjacent to a park, seems surrounded by city, and there's seldom a view of an animal that doesn't have stores and streets and traffic lights serving as the backdrop.
One of Topeka's biggest weakness is, outside of the bug room in Animals and Man, a lack of small animals. Apart from a caiman and red-footed tortoise in the rainforest building I didn't see a single herp in the zoo (the tortoises in the monkey exhibit were confirmed by sign, not by sight), There is a small room near the gift shop that has a few small species, but it can only be visited when staff are present to man it, which was not the case when I visited. The Liana Forest and the main building at Camp Cowabunga could probably have been planned to have a few small exhibits in them, and who knows what will happen when Animals and Man empties out as the giraffes (and later elephants) move out?
Topeka strikes me as a good zoo that, for many years, was perhaps too content to sit on its laurels, until one day it woke up and realized that it was getting up there in its years. Recently it has shown new vim and energy, starting to improve or replace past exhibits and strive to do better for its visitors and animals. I look forward to visiting again when the new giraffe exhibit opens, as well as to seeing what future changes are in store for this once - and perhaps future - "World Famous" zoo.
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