My wife and I visited the Cougar Mountain Zoological Park today, a tiny zoo half an hour east of Seattle. It is extremely small and not entirely memorable in comparison to major collections, and it has the misfortune to be fairly close to one of the best zoos in North America (Woodland Park Zoo).
One notable fact about the zoo is that it has the largest collection of bronze animal sculptures in the United States, as well as the largest herd of reindeer in the country. There is a lot of construction ongoing at the moment, including an expanded area for a series of large macaw aviaries, an almost finished tiger enclosure that is at least double the size of the current exhibit, a new lemur island, an otter exhibit and a cheetah yard. All of those exhibits appear to be well underway towards being completed, but as it stands we were at the zoo for less than 2 hours in total. Adding up all of the zoos, aquariums and wildlife parks that I've visited in my life I'm at exactly 74...and Cougar Mountain is one of the smallest and least consequential. It has promise, but is never going to be anything more than a grain of sand in the vast zoo industry of North America.
There is a small, one-room museum on site with numerous examples of taxidermy, a Cougar Mountain Academy School (grades K-5) built directly next to the zoo, and the staff were plentiful and helpful. I'll upload at least a hundred photos, but for the most part the enclosures were small and unspectacular. The lemur exhibits in particular were all enclosed and painful to look at, the tiger and cougar enclosures were not conducive to great viewing opportunities and were far too small, and many of the enclosures were not the safest for visitors as it would be possible to reach in and touch the emus, wallabies, alpacas, cranes, macaws, mule deer and reindeer, and in fact feeding via machines was actively encouraged.
The entire collection: (in some cases these are approx. numbers)
Tiger = 2 (one "golden" Bengal and one white)
Cougar = 2
Ring-Tailed Lemur = 4
Red Ruffed Lemur = 2
Black + White Ruffed Lemur = 4
Reindeer = 15?
Mule Deer = 1
Alpaca = 3
Swamp Wallaby = 3
Emu = 4
Sarus Crane = 1
African Crowned Crane = 8
Wood Duck = 4
Macaws/Parrots = 40? (massive collection of all sorts of species)
