Day 3: Came for the Tayra and Tanuki, Stayed for the Whataburger
Ah, Oklahoma. The land of a famous song, lots of tornadoes, and some bison... yep, think that about covers it. As it happens, none of the three things I came to see/do in Oklahoma are actually *from* Oklahoma: tayra and tanuki come from Latin America and Japan respectively, and Whataburger was founded and is primarily based in Texas. But what better place to get Texas fast food than Occupied North Texas?
[Source: Randall Munroe, xkcd: Orbiter]
I felt surprisingly good for barely sleeping at all in Amarillo, and after another mediocre McDonald’s breakfast I hit the road for my 4-hour trip to the next zoo. I had continued having trouble with my duct tape situation the previous evening, and left as early as I could manage this morning to avoid the issue. Fortunately, Lady Luck (who lives in Oklahoma I guess?) smiled upon me and my sad sack car today, with the tape holding up the entire way to Oklahoma City. Therefore, I was able to arrive in the parking lot at noon on the dot. My camera was fully charged with electricity, my brain was fully charged with Monster Energy Drink, and my motivation was fully charged with the prospect of rare carnivores.
Oklahoma City Zoo
Location: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Size: ~65 acres (much of it under construction currently)
Species Count: 209
Closed Areas: future African area (under construction), inside of Noble Aquatic Center
Rarities: Tanuki, Nine-banded Armadillo, Galapagos Giant Tortoise (
C. vandenburghi type)
Price: $12 admission
Time: 4.5 hours
Recommended Time: 4-5 hours currently; once African complex opens, 5-6 hours minimum or entire day
Species List:
Oklahoma City Zoo Species List - Nov 2021 [Oklahoma City Zoo]
Media Gallery:
Oklahoma City Zoo - ZooChat
I was saved from running out of time at OKC Zoo by the fact that a solid chunk of it is a field of red earth and bulldozers surrounded by chain link fencing; that area will soon become Expedition Africa, opened on the former location of a Pachyderm House (which once held the country’s oldest Pygmy Hippo) and a handful of other odds and ends. As a result of the construction, there were a few African animals randomly scattered about, including lions rotating with painted dogs and a pair of bat-eared foxes at the front of the Oklahoma native complex. I pretended not to notice – it’s the polite thing to do when someone’s house looks weird during remodeling – and started my roughly clockwise loop through the zoo.
I wasn’t actually sure where the Tayra was supposed to be and the Tanuki were (I thought) only at the back end of the zoo in the Asian complex; therefore, I decided to hit the Herpetarium first so I could make sure to get a full species list. The building looked small from the outside, which makes sense because it appears to be an older building; I thought I had recalled OKC having a pretty solid herp collection, so I wondered how they could fit it into such a small building.
I quickly found out how; they sacrificed walkway space in order to shove ~60 species of herp into a building smaller than many people’s houses. It barely fits people without strollers going one way, and you would win money by betting that people weren’t only going one way and without strollers! Several times I had to just turn around and backtrack around the building’s loop because I couldn’t get past. In my opinion this is a poor and outdated design, especially given the current pandemic regime: narrow hallways and low ceilings make social distancing impossible, almost nobody besides myself was wearing a mask despite signage outside encouraging people to do so (which is pretty much the norm in Oklahoma), and this particular state is one of the least vaccinated in the country. Hopefully after the current projects are finished the zoo will prioritize building a new herpetarium; they have a great collection, but frankly at the moment it’s not displayed very effectively.
Other than the crowded walkways, the enclosures were well-furnished if smaller than what I would prefer to see. A few rarities cropped up among the 60-odd species in the collection, including Lake Titicaca Frog, Halmahera Gecko and Python, Kanburian and Sri Lankan Palm Pitvipers, Northern Yellow-faced Turtle, Klemmer’s Day Gecko, and Laos Warty Newt (the latter two of which I did not see unfortunately). The Lake Titicaca Frog in particular was a great find: as some of you may know, the population of these unusual frogs started out at Denver only a few years ago and has ballooned at an incredible pace... to the point of quickly becoming one of the more common amphibians on the continent in the span of just a couple years! To my recollection this was my first look at one, though unfortunately I did not get any photos worth sharing.
Sri Lankan Pit Viper
Moving on to the rest of the zoo: I swept through the children’s zoo because I’m a completionist at heart. The species of note here is the Galapagos Giant Tortoise, specifically
Chelonoidis vandenburghi. I’m not 100% solid on my revised
Chelonoidis taxonomy, but to my recollection OKC has the only breeding group in the country. They were sitting out on the lawn eating grass, as unaware as the guests of how unique they are.
I found a nice surprise just past the Herpetarium and children’s zoo: the Dan Moran Aviary, a building that is barely noticeable on the map. It turned out to be a small but nice little building, if for no other reason than it was blissfully quiet and empty compared to the packed Herpetarium. A middle walkway winded past four mixed-species enclosures separated from each other and visitors by mesh. A total of 18 species inhabited the building, including a few notable ones like Curl-crested Aracari, Yellow-breasted Ground Dove, and Hooded Pitta (unseen, as is their MO). Down the path from the aviary was a row of four outdoor cages for a few hardier temperate birds, including a pair of Laughing Kookaburra.
Friends, I couldn’t help myself; I did a bad thing. I heard from someone that it’s fairly easy to set Kookaburras off into a raucous cacophany, and I wanted to try it for myself. While a small handful of visitors watched me strangely, I pulled Youtube open on my phone and started playing clips of Kookaburra calls. At first the birds just glared at me, their mouths slightly agape like they wanted to tell me off but also didn’t want to give me the satisfaction. By the second video however, they’d had enough. A ripple of chattering erupted from their throats, and within seconds myself and those standing around me were treated to a true Australian display of nature’s most obnoxious home security system. Everyone was impressed; one guy even laughed and clapped me on the back, as if I’d walked in on a pickup basketball game and made a three-pointer from half court. Unfortunately, the kookaburras were genuinely riled up: one of them flew to the back of the cage to build up steam, then began divebombing the front mesh to get at me. I had stopped playing the video as soon as I had gotten them calling, but I had to leave pretty soon after that as the bird continued to divebomb towards me and I didn’t want it to get hurt. Word of warning: always be careful when messing with any animal from the island continent.
The next couple hours were slightly less eventful. I looked out onto a large lake where wild gulls flocked, some sea lions inhabited a rocky pool at a building that once housed dolphins, and a row of raptor aviaries had perhaps the most bizarre species mix I have ever seen (Andean Condor, White-necked Raven, Red Junglefowl, and Helmeted Guineafowl – making me, I’m pretty sure, the first ZooChatter in history to have a photograph of a condor and a proto-chicken standing next to each other). A row of small grottoes seemed innocuous at first, but the last one surprised me – a pair of sleeping Tanuki! Apparently the zoo needed a second enclosure for them and so they ended up on the other side of the zoo.
The next couple of complexes were for cats and great apes. The cat complex, I now know, is where the Tayra used to be. I say used to be because the enclosure that once held them now has a Fishing Cat (one of three enclosures for that species in the complex) and Tayra was nowhere to be found throughout the zoo. Dang it. The cat complex was decent, with 7 species housed across several enclosures. The ape complex was also fine but not particularly memorable; the apes were fairly inactive when I was around and I’d seen all of them plenty of times before, so I decided to head up and check out the still fairly new Sanctuary Asia.
The first exhibits you see in Sanctuary Asia are older and for the zoo’s elephant herd. This might be the most impressive-looking elephant complex I’ve seen at any zoo, full stop. I saw a total of 6 Asian elephants living across three regular yards and a demonstration yard where keepers were attempting to entice a young elephant to come through a gate by throwing pieces of fruit by it (to little avail – the youngster was far more interested in the dead leaves that had accumulated in the demo yard). The yards were giant lawns with fresh-looking grass, massive wooden shade platforms, and a large elephant-deep pool. You could look inside part of the massive elephant barn with Asian motifs as well. The whole complex was great, and seeing half a dozen elephants in total was a treat.
Past the elephants was the rest of the complex that opened more recently. This included two massive yards for Indian Rhinoceros, including a mother and youngster; a netted enclosure for Francois’ Langur and two more Tanukis (including an all-white individual!); a pair of Cassowaries; outdoor and indoor enclosures for a Komodo Dragon, which can be seen from inside the Lotus Pavilion (where one can buy zoo-made American Chinese food – a fact I wish I had known before I snacked on chicken tenders an hour or so earlier); and a habitat for Red Pandas that culminates in a dead end. A path by the cassowaries and Komodo leads back down to the apes. The complex is impressive in scale and seems to be a worthwhile addition to the zoo, although personally I found it too low in species for my taste. It has a strong pan-Asian motif to it, if you can tell:
The final complex was Oklahoma Trails, where I hoped to pick up a few more species for ZCCNA – and that I did. The complex is home to a staggering 68 species, of which only two (Bat-eared Fox and Seba’s Short-tailed Bat) were not native to the United States. The exhibits follow one long loop, with a patch of woodland in the middle where Northern Cardinals were excitedly chirping and sorting through the leaf litter. The outdoor enclosures feature a large Bison yard; very large, rolling yards for Grizzly and American Black Bears (the Grizzlies were unseen – they had dug a burrow into the ground to doze in, as apparently they do every winter); a large yard for elderly Whooping Cranes that looked beautiful with the fall foliage; and several other enclosures for ungulates, birds, carnivores, prairie dogs, and alligators. A mixed-species aviary held many native birds, including Mourning Dove, Northern Bobwhite, Ring-necked Pheasant, Killdeer, and a variety of waterfowl.
The highlight for me was inside the red barn-turned-small nocturnal house, Creatures of the Night. I suspected the Tayra might be here – after all, the Seba’s bats weren’t Oklahoma natives – but alas it wasn’t. However, I found another surprise: a Nine-banded Armadillo, sleeping in a plastic tub half-buried in wood chips. This was my first ever living Nine-banded – in a zoo or wild – and in captivity it’s roughly as rare as Tayra. It also counted for ZCCNA like a Tayra. Needless to say, I walked away a satisfied customer.
The last few odds and ends required backtracking on the Oklahoma loop, and consisted of the remaining remnants of the African collection: a few hoofstock in large grassy yards and a series of newer chain-link enclosures for painted dogs and cheetahs. The last enclosure of the day was the giraffe paddock; my camera’s battery finally gave in immediately after I took my last photo of the day there, as if it instinctively knew how long I would need to depend on it. It’s learning...
In short: the Oklahoma City Zoo is a great zoo with some cool species and lots of very nice-looking exhibits. I love autumn and thought that the fall foliage (still clinging on this far south in late November) added to the aesthetic, but I’m sure it looks nice in spring and summer as well. I ended up finishing the zoo around 4:45 PM with almost no rushing except on the last few enclosures (and that was mainly because my camera battery was in the red), so an improvement over the previous day’s nail-biting performance.
Traveling
As with Albuquerque, it was dark by the time I got out of OKC. Fortunately, it was only 5 hours to my next city and zoo, and the next zoo would be smaller than today’s; therefore, I knew I could drive part of the way there, catch up on sleep, wake up the next morning and drive the remaining couple of hours. I ended up driving 3 hours to a small town just over the border in Arkansas. It’s like Kansas, but with more “ar”. Also it’s pronounced differently, and it looks completely different and people have different accents and cultures. Basically, it’s nothing like Kansas.
Hey, I didn’t name this stuff; I just live here.
Fast Food Review of the Day: Whataburger
“What a burger!” You get it. Whataburger is a staple food group for Texans; it’s known for good burgers (obviously) and also for being one of the only places - sometimes the only place! - open 24 hours in a Texas town. If you look at a location map of Whataburgers for Texas, it seems almost like they have a mandate: Leave No Hungry Texans Behind. The company was gracious enough to allow a few stores to open up in Occupied North Texas as well, and it is to one of these I ventured last night.
I got a classic double-patty burger, fries, and a specialty milkshake – chocolate mint (in case you weren't able to tell by now, I like my milkshakes). I had read that the single-patty burger might be too little for some people, but I don’t think I was the target audience; I barely finished it and the fries, and had to pathetically empty my milkshake in small sips through the rest of the trip to Arkansas so my stomach wouldn’t rupture en route. The burger was great; it was similar to the slightly charred outside of In ‘n Out patties, but beefier and juicier – basically more
oomph. The fries were crispy and had a great taste to them; I’d be comfortable saying they rank near the top of fast food fries, although it’s hard to beat the curly fries from Arby’s. The milkshake was thick and tasty as well.
Verdict: if you ever go to Texas – or the ONT – feel free to swing by Whataburger and give it a try. Who knows, you might even see political superstar Beto O’Rourke skateboarding in the parking lot.
Barely a mention, and no photos for me?
Cheetah photos should always make the review, though 
