biggest_dreamer
Well-Known Member
North Georgia Wildlife Park (aka North Georgia Zoo, North Georgia Safari Park) is a hybrid drive-thru/tour facility in Cleveland, GA. They have a handful of rare species, which is what initially set them in my sights, but they also have a less than stellar reputation and are known for continuously breeding and selling animals. I was apprehensive before going, but finally bit the bullet yesterday.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the price is excessive. $40 for a single adult is more than all but the most renowned AZA facilities charge. It’s made all the tougher to swallow considering the abysmal quality of so much of this place, but I guess that’s just what you have to pay if you’re in Georgia and want to see a honey badger.
I arrived at around 10:40 am compared to an advertised opening time of 11, so I prepared to sit in my car for a few minutes. To my surprise a staff member stepped out and told me they could go ahead and take people, so I went through the process of redeeming my pre-purchased ticket. The staff here were all universally exceptionally nice and accommodating, which I wasn’t expecting given the place’s poor reputation and how aggressively their website warns about late and rescheduling fees for every little thing. So if anyone from the zoo winds up reading this, let the primary takeaway be that everyone I interacted with was amazing.
I should also note that this place offers a ton of encounters and meet & greets, and advertises them aggressively on their website and on-site signage.
The zoo is divided into two halves, each of which is sort of further split into two distinct portions. The drive-through portion is small and guests are invited to circle around as many times as they’d like. The on-foot portion requires you to cross the road, and features an open petting zoo area and a gated-off tour-only area with guided tours included as part of each ticket purchase and offered every hour starting at noon. Since I had a bit over an hour to kill before my tour, I started with the drive-through.
By and large, the drive-through portion is not actually a safari park, as you might expect - it’s more or less a typical zoo, except you stay in your car. It seems like this would make for some weird interactions where you’ve got species that people can easily spend quite a while watching, such as penguins and otters, except you can’t exactly stop and watch them without holding up the line. I didn’t run into this, because I was the only car driving through this portion for the length of my stay, and neither the penguins nor otters actually came out, but it still feels like a bizarre setup, made worse by the fact that what felt like the best angle for viewing the penguins would require you to stop halfway up a hill.
Worse than that, though, was the general quality of the exhibit. Most of them were truly abysmal. The penguins and otters both had decently large exhibits, but no natural substrate as far as I could tell. Most other species got the opposite of this: they lived in tiny mud pits with no visible enrichment. Half a dozen flamingos were huddled up in a space about the size of my closet. A supposed alligator exhibit had no standing water, just a waterlogged canoe (???). Almost all of the exhibits felt cobbled together, and felt like they were made with whatever construction scraps were on hand that day. Nothing here felt great, and a lot of it was heartbreaking. Some (some) of the birds, notably the hornbills and augur buzzard, and perhaps parrots to a lesser extent, seemed to have an okay setup, and thankfully the honey badgers seemed to have an okayish amount of space (assuming the back half of their exhibit was accessible) and actual enrichment. But basically everything else? Abhorrent.
Italics are signed, unseen.
Drive-Through enclosures species list
The drive-through area also boasts a very small safari loop, but it’s so small, steep, and devoid of animals that I genuinely wonder why they bother. I only did this portion once, and was in and out in under three minutes. There were no more than a dozen animals inside, and about half of them were llamas.
“Safari Park” species list
Petting Zoo species list
Guided Tour species list
If the tour area was the only part of the zoo, I would’ve had some hope that this was a formerly subpar facility making strides to improve themselves. But looking at the greater picture? I have no idea what to make of this place. I get the impression that they’re very financially stable, between the exorbitant entrance fee, plethora of aggressively-marketed add on experiences, as well as the large number of genuinely pleasant staff members. So why are so many of the exhibits so dumpy? I mean, we all know why. I just wish places like this would do better since they clearly have the means to. If the entire place were as high quality as the handful of exhibits I highlighted, I could easily see this place being considered one of the best non-AZA facilities in the country. Unfortunately, that’s so far from being the case, and it’s very difficult to actually recommend it in any capacity in its current state. I just hope they can continue to improve things, because the potential is definitely there, at least on the tour side.
Tagging @Torgos who made a thread earlier this year asking about this place.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the price is excessive. $40 for a single adult is more than all but the most renowned AZA facilities charge. It’s made all the tougher to swallow considering the abysmal quality of so much of this place, but I guess that’s just what you have to pay if you’re in Georgia and want to see a honey badger.
I arrived at around 10:40 am compared to an advertised opening time of 11, so I prepared to sit in my car for a few minutes. To my surprise a staff member stepped out and told me they could go ahead and take people, so I went through the process of redeeming my pre-purchased ticket. The staff here were all universally exceptionally nice and accommodating, which I wasn’t expecting given the place’s poor reputation and how aggressively their website warns about late and rescheduling fees for every little thing. So if anyone from the zoo winds up reading this, let the primary takeaway be that everyone I interacted with was amazing.
I should also note that this place offers a ton of encounters and meet & greets, and advertises them aggressively on their website and on-site signage.
The zoo is divided into two halves, each of which is sort of further split into two distinct portions. The drive-through portion is small and guests are invited to circle around as many times as they’d like. The on-foot portion requires you to cross the road, and features an open petting zoo area and a gated-off tour-only area with guided tours included as part of each ticket purchase and offered every hour starting at noon. Since I had a bit over an hour to kill before my tour, I started with the drive-through.
By and large, the drive-through portion is not actually a safari park, as you might expect - it’s more or less a typical zoo, except you stay in your car. It seems like this would make for some weird interactions where you’ve got species that people can easily spend quite a while watching, such as penguins and otters, except you can’t exactly stop and watch them without holding up the line. I didn’t run into this, because I was the only car driving through this portion for the length of my stay, and neither the penguins nor otters actually came out, but it still feels like a bizarre setup, made worse by the fact that what felt like the best angle for viewing the penguins would require you to stop halfway up a hill.
Worse than that, though, was the general quality of the exhibit. Most of them were truly abysmal. The penguins and otters both had decently large exhibits, but no natural substrate as far as I could tell. Most other species got the opposite of this: they lived in tiny mud pits with no visible enrichment. Half a dozen flamingos were huddled up in a space about the size of my closet. A supposed alligator exhibit had no standing water, just a waterlogged canoe (???). Almost all of the exhibits felt cobbled together, and felt like they were made with whatever construction scraps were on hand that day. Nothing here felt great, and a lot of it was heartbreaking. Some (some) of the birds, notably the hornbills and augur buzzard, and perhaps parrots to a lesser extent, seemed to have an okay setup, and thankfully the honey badgers seemed to have an okayish amount of space (assuming the back half of their exhibit was accessible) and actual enrichment. But basically everything else? Abhorrent.
Italics are signed, unseen.
Drive-Through enclosures species list
- Cattle (mostly Highland)
- Water buffalo
- American alligator
- Ostrich
- Alpaca
- Asian small-clawed otter
- African penguin
- Dromedary
- (unsigned exhibit that I believe is for African porcupine)
- Red river hog (3 or 4 separate exhibits)
- Grey crowned crane, southern screamer
- Southern ground hornbill
- Augur buzzard
- Common eland
- Llama
- Common warthog
- Blue wildebeest
- Honey badger
- Eclectus sp.
- Emu
- Fallow deer
- White cockatoo
- Military macaw
- Blue-and-gold macaw
- Fancy pigeon
- Indian peafowl, southern screamer, duck sp.
- Domestic turkey
- Plains zebra, donkey, horse
- Domestic yak
- Nilgai
- Nyala
- Capybara
- Lesser flamingo
- Sheep
- Goat
- Pig
- Zebu
- Greylag goose
- Helmeted guineafowl (free-roaming)
The drive-through area also boasts a very small safari loop, but it’s so small, steep, and devoid of animals that I genuinely wonder why they bother. I only did this portion once, and was in and out in under three minutes. There were no more than a dozen animals inside, and about half of them were llamas.
“Safari Park” species list
- Llama
- Plains bison
- Emu
- Highland cattle
- Domestic yak
- Common eland
Petting Zoo species list
- Llama
- Dromedary
- Chicken
- Goat
- Pig
- Sheep
- Domestic rabbit
- Helmeted guineafowl
- Laughing kookaburra
Guided Tour species list
- American alligator
- Bat-eared fox
- Cape porcupine
- South American coati (the guide unsurprisingly called it a “mountain coati”)
- North American beaver
- Red kangaroo
- Eurasian eagle owl
- Lesser yellow-headed vulture
- Common buzzard
- Red-necked wallaby, swamp wallaby
- Gray wolf
- New Guinea singing dog
- Lowland paca
- Asian small-clawed otter
- Ring-tailed lemur
- Red-ruffed lemur
- Serval
- Caracal
- Canada lynx
- Lar gibbon
- Reeve’s muntjac
- Golden pheasant
- Linnaeus’s two-toed sloth
- Spectacled owl
- Red-tailed hawk
- Binturong
- Fennec fox
- Flemish Giant rabbit
- Egyptian fruit bat (nocturnal house)
- Galago sp. (nocturnal house)
- New world porcupine sp. (nocturnal house)
- Southern tamandua (nocturnal house)
- Nyala
- Indian peafowl, Patagonian mara
- Capybara
- Great curassow
- Tortoise sp.
If the tour area was the only part of the zoo, I would’ve had some hope that this was a formerly subpar facility making strides to improve themselves. But looking at the greater picture? I have no idea what to make of this place. I get the impression that they’re very financially stable, between the exorbitant entrance fee, plethora of aggressively-marketed add on experiences, as well as the large number of genuinely pleasant staff members. So why are so many of the exhibits so dumpy? I mean, we all know why. I just wish places like this would do better since they clearly have the means to. If the entire place were as high quality as the handful of exhibits I highlighted, I could easily see this place being considered one of the best non-AZA facilities in the country. Unfortunately, that’s so far from being the case, and it’s very difficult to actually recommend it in any capacity in its current state. I just hope they can continue to improve things, because the potential is definitely there, at least on the tour side.
Tagging @Torgos who made a thread earlier this year asking about this place.
