Favorite: The Audubon Zoo in New Orleans. The lush greenery & the extensive use of animal habitat areas with natural barriers rather than cages were very refreshing. I've seen nothing quite like it since me 'n' Mrs. JMC first visited 35+ years ago.T.C. wrote: Wed Mar 20, 2019 8:22 amwow! how have we never talked about this? that's awesome. what's your favorite? least favorite? coolest? best story?JMC-STL wrote: Tue Mar 19, 2019 8:41 pmI love going to zoos (have visited 58 of them), but even I'd have a hard time stretching a visit to the STL Zoo into a full-day adventure. ...bradleygt89 wrote: Tue Mar 19, 2019 8:03 pmdefinitely going to be spending time at Forest Park too, and the Zoo is part of that trip
Honorable Mention: Skip the San Diego Zoo (too pricey for what they have to offer) & instead visit their Zoo Safari Park (fka, San Diego Wild Animal Park). Well worth the drive AND the admission price.
Least Favorite: I've been to several municipal & private zoos around the U.S. that were dreadful places for animals to live & for people to visit. The most unmemorable to The JMCs is thankfully now replaced by a slightly better & more humane facility. The facility formerly occupying the general footprint of the Alabama Gulf Coast Zoo consisted of an entry shack selling crappy merchandise, with one large caged area behind it housing a motley collection of mostly unremarkable animals but included what might've been the world's largest domestic pigeon. Its wings couldn't have lifted its own weight to a perch one foot above the sandy ground of the cage, which I vaguely recall being littered with cigarette butts (from patrons or the pigeon?).
Dishonorable Mention: The Southern Nevada Zoological-Botanical Park just south of the Las Vegas Strip. Closed in 2013 (gratefully), the story I heard was that it started as someone's backyard menagerie of tropical birds. It was expanded at some point to include one lonely Siberian tiger and a couple of other large mammals by the time I visited back in the late 1980s. The original (or maybe just the last) owner was a Vegas cop who mismanaged the business & the animals in his care, and that's what finally shut down ops to the benefit of man & beast.
Coolest: Hmmmm, tough call. My Favorite & Honorable Mention zoos above fit that description, presuming by "cool" you don't mean air temperature (zoos being warm weather attractions for me). For "coolest" as in most unusual or noteworthy for zoo junkies, I'd have to mention the Marwell Zoo in Hampshire southwest of London, England. John Cleese shot scenes there for his 1997 movie Fierce Creatures (the supposed sequel to A Fish Called Wanda). Most noteworthy for my visit in the late 1990s was having to stop at the zoo entrance, and step in a trough of who-knows-what to make sure my shoes weren't still carrying any traces of the infectious proteins linked to mad cow disease. Cool AND creepy.
Best Story (hands down, no contest): Me 'n' the missus and our two kids visited the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs back in the late 1980s (a peak time in my zoo obsession). At the time they had their great apes housed in enclosures with thick glass walls on one side for viewing. I was walking several paces ahead of Mrs. JMC and the little JMCs, and paused to make faces at a large male orangutan who was hanging out approx. 15 feet inside the glass. As I stepped away, my wife arrived at the spot just as the ape swung on his enclosure rope & crashed into the glass wall. To this day, my wife blames me for one of the biggest scares of her long life. Maybe it was my howling laughter that gave me away.