Zoo Review: Fort Wayne Children's Zoo, Part II

Continuing the walk through the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo, we leave the Central Zoo region and embark on one of the two remaining trails.

Asian Trek consists of two main sections.  The first, newer, and much smaller, is Red Panda Ridge, which mostly consists of a pair of spacious habitats for the namesake mammals.  I'm always a little leery of the idea of having red pandas as flagship, anchor species.  Yes, they are extremely cute.  They also tend to be pretty inactive, especially during the warmer months when most people flock to the zoo.  It was a poor cool day when I visited, so I was able to see them out and about, though in the summer I imagine you'd be lucky to see a little red blob tucked away in the back.  The pandas are complemented by a small aviary of East Asian birds, though both the pandas and the birds are overshadowed by the massive play structure for kids which looms over the area.

From the pandas, the trail winds through the woods to the Indonesian Rainforest.  Visitors first come to a towering exhibit of clouded leopards.  It's one of the best exhibits I've seen for this species - a good size, lushly planted, and very tall - which also makes it one of the more difficult exhibits to see these elusive cats in.  Immediately past the leopards is the main rainforest building.  A small atrium features exhibits of reptiles and small mammals from Indonesia - the massive reticulated python being the star attraction - before emptying into the Jungle Dome Aviary.  This is a thickly vegetated forest aviary, with a path the loops around a central, waterfall-fed pool.  Birds seen here include crested wood partridge, Mariana fruit dove, and Indian pygmy geese, among others.  A side path from the aviary leads to a viewing area for Sumatran orangutans.  The orangutan exhibit is perhaps the week point of the section, as the apes lack an outdoor exhibit area, though I believe that one is being planned.

Outside, more guest services are found in a small courtyard, along with an endangered species carousel.  It is also here that visitors will find an attractive exhibit of Sumatran tigers.  From the tigers, a boardwalk winds through the forest back to start of Asian Trek, passing smaller habitats for cockatoos, hornbills, and squirrels.  The main attraction on this trail is the enclosure for Javan gibbons, a species seldom seen in zoos (and probably on its way out in North America).  I liked that this gibbon exhibit was an actual cage, rather than one of the islands that are so popular in zoos - the later are more attractive and better for photography, it's true, but here I was able to see the swinging apes take full advantage of the mesh of their enclosure as a climbing structure as they flung themselves through the branches, ricocheting off of walls.

The final and largest of the four regions is African Journey.  Passing through a lovely garden and under a tunnel, visitors will embark on a looping trail that surrounds the main savannah, populated by ostrich, plains zebra, and common wildebeest and visible from several vantage points around the trail.  As is often the case with African areas, this one has some heavy theming, and I in particular saw a long line of kids waiting their turn to play in a jeep that was parked off the side of the trail.  The trail leads past a marshy yard of sitatunga antelope and a lagoon paddled by great white pelicans, after which visitors will find themselves in an artificial kopje (and island of rocks in the savannah), from which they have vantage points of several exhibits of smaller African animals, such as bat-eared fox, banded mongoose, and radiated tortoise.  Among the caves are also viewing portals into the domains of Africa's two largest carnivores - lions and spotted hyenas.  

Down the trail, the path soon opens into the African Village, which, among its play areas (the zoo is heavily into play areas) and  rest stations are exhibits of birds (including some seldom-seen species, such as milky eagle own) and primates - DeBrazza's, colobus, and Allen's swamp monkeys.  A leopard exhibit (using the Amur subspecies as a stand-in for the African leopard) is the anchor here, though it compares unfavorably with most of the other cat exhibits at the zoo - not terrible, but somewhat lacking in imagination and complexity (leopards are a species that I often feel gets the short end of the stick in exhibit quality compared to lions, tigers, and jaguars.  Just past the village is a separate savannah, home to giraffes.  In a clear favorite for most zoo visitors, a giraffe feeding station puts guests at eye-level with the world's tallest mammals.  The trail then meanders past some of Africa's largest birds - marabou stork, Ruppell's griffon vulture, wattled crane - as well as more vantage points of the main savannah yard, before returning to Central Zoo.

Fort Wayne Children's Zoo left a very positive impression on me, while I admit that there were a few exhibits that I'd like to see tweaked or improved.  I had spent the previous day at the Indianapolis Zoo, and while Indianapolis had a few megafauna species that were absent from Fort Wayne (bears, elephants, rhinos), overall I found Fort Wayne to have the more well-rounded collection, with good representation of birds, herps, and small mammals.  Despite the name, I'm not sure if the zoo is any more or less kid-friendly than the majority of zoos I've been to, but it is a highly interactive one with lots of opportunities for play and engagement.