DAY 6: Thursday, July 6th
Earlier on this trip I toured a couple of small facilities on the northern coast (Northcoast Marine Mammal Center and B. Bryan Preserve) and then I headed south to what is commonly referred to as the Bay Area. Here, at approximately the halfway point of California, is a confluence of 3 large cities (San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose) and within a loose circle are 15 “zoos” and I’ve now visited all of them, whether on this trip or on previous excursions through the state. There is a theme park (Six Flags), an African experience (Safari West Preserve) and several smaller sanctuaries, nature centers and kid-friendly, community-based establishments. Arguably the best of the lot is the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, a vast behemoth that cost $500 million when it opened in 2008 and within its bowels is the Steinhart Aquarium. Safari West is an enjoyable place to visit but costs a fortune and most of the animals can only be seen via a jeep tour. The next biggest and best could potentially be San Francisco Zoo as it receives almost one million annual visitors, but there is a lot about that facility that desperately needs to be renovated and/or bulldozed. Oakland Zoo is perhaps going to be the premier zoo in the region as of next year when the $70 million California Trails opens to complement what is a 3-hour, fairly solid little zoo. With the long-gestating California habitats set to bring in a boom in terms of visitor numbers, Oakland might be taking another step towards the big leagues.
In regards to San Francisco Zoo, a facility that I toured this week, I believe that what the establishment needs is the fundraising for a truly world-class addition. It needs a “Russia’s Grizzly Coast”, which saw Minnesota Zoo’s attendance shoot up to 1.3 million at that time and firmly placed that zoo on the radar amongst the best in the USA. Even small zoos can get a shot in the arm with the addition of a multi-acre, expensive new complex. Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, Texas, had Brazos River Country open slightly more than a decade ago and that part of the zoo is superb. Getting back to San Francisco, there needs to be less Band-Aid exhibits. The zoo has a patched-up South American building that was renovated and re-opened in 2015 but what is inside really isn’t that great. The ongoing overhaul of the WPA bear grottoes has been above average (Grizzly Gulch, Wolf Canyon, the upcoming American Black Bear exhibit) but all of those are tweaks to existing terrain. The Coquerel’s Sifaka exhibit is okay but nothing that will bring in the crowds, and the new playgrounds are wonderful for little kids but obviously there are no new animal exhibits in that area. San Francisco Zoo needs a statement exhibit and I would love to see something done with tigers. After a tiger attacked a keeper in 2006, and the tiger escape in 2007 that ended in tragedy, it would put a marker in the sand if Tiger Trek opened in a few years, a world-class habitat for a species that could be reclaimed by the zoo in a positive manner. A tiger habitat could even be the first step towards an Asian precinct, something that the zoo is lacking.
Here are the 15 “zoos” that I’ve visited that are all within an approximate 1.5-hour radius of the Bay Area:
Aquarium of the Bay (San Francisco)
California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco) - Steinhart Aquarium
California Raptor Center (Davis)
CuriOdyssey (San Mateo)
Folsom City Zoo Sanctuary (Folsom)
Happy Hollow Park & Zoo (San Jose) – visited twice, both times in 2011
Lindsay Wildlife Experience (Walnut Creek)
Marine Mammal Center (Sausalito)
Micke Grove Zoo (Lodi)
Oakland Zoo (Oakland)
Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo (Palo Alto)
Safari West Wildlife Preserve (Sonoma County)
San Francisco Zoo (San Francisco) – visited twice, 2006 and 2017
Six Flags Discovery Kingdom (Vallejo)
Sulphur Creek Nature Center (Hayward)
Now that I was done with the San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose trifecta, I headed along the coast to visit a couple of places that perhaps no other ZooChatter has ever been to.
Zoo/Aquarium #13: Seymour Marine Discovery Center
This establishment is located in Santa Cruz, about an hour south of San Jose and directly on the coastline of the Pacific Ocean. This small aquarium gets a 10 out of 10 for its magnificent setting, and before it opened I spent time checking out the fantastic, 87-foot long, mounted Blue Whale skeleton outside (one of the largest in the world), as well as seeing a mounted Grey Whale skeleton along a scenic walking path. Just a few feet from the edge of the trail is a precipitous cliff and far below was the crashing of the ocean on the rocks. There is a series of buildings here, with many researchers and oceanographers studying all sorts of marine-related items and this summer the parking lot is getting completely repaved and reconfigured and so all visitors have to park several blocks away. I truly wanted to love this place, with its amazing vista outside, its Monterey Bay Aquarium-style façade and location, the dozen workers and volunteers who were all eager to show me around and answer any questions that I had……BUT……
The truth is that Seymour Marine Discovery Center might be situated in a phenomenal setting with multiple buildings but in reality once you strip away the research labs, classrooms and ocean views there are only 2 large rooms and approximately 16 tanks on public display. Including wandering around outside I struggled to spend even 30 minutes here and at $8 it is a bit pricey considering what is on offer. The main entrance area is a grandiose room, with whale statues hanging from the ceiling and loads of information on coral research, climate change, coastal tides, animal facts, etc., but only a single tank with a couple of 4-foot long female Swell Sharks that can be petted. They are almost certainly the largest sharks that I’ve ever seen in a touch tank but even that did not open until 30 minutes after the aquarium opened…where is the logic in that? The second room had 15 tanks, including a long touch tank area and then a couple of rows of average-sized exhibits. Seeing a Red Octopus obtain its food from a glass bottle was pretty cool, as was the collection of Red Pelagic Crabs, and the Spotted Cusk-Eel, and even the Fat Innkeeper Worm in its see-through tube, but this facility is very small and the animals on offer are very few.
Zoo/Aquarium #14: Monterey Zoo
An hour south of Santa Cruz, and about half-an-hour from Monterey and its world-class aquarium, lies the inland city of Salinas and the somewhat infamous Monterey Zoo. This facility is closed to the public except for a daily one-hour tour that starts promptly at 1:00 and on some days in the summer there is a second, 3:00 tour. I arrived at this zoo with very low expectations as I’ve never met anyone who has visited and from what I’d seen online I didn’t have my hopes up. However, I always maintain that every single zoo is worth visiting at least once, partly because “it is there” but also because each zoo deserves an opportunity to reveal itself to an individual. I’ll visit any zoo once and there are hundreds of facilities that I’ll never go back to again but at least I gave them a shot. I found that Monterey Zoo was a real mixed-bag, with some atrocious cages but there is a wave of optimism that gave me hope for the future. The zoo has radically changed in the past 3 years as before that it was regarded as a roadside hellhole.
There were enough visitors signed up for the 1:00 tour so that we were all divided up into two groups, with a tour guide for each crowd. I travelled around in a cluster with about 20 others and our guide was a joke-cracking lady who wore a microphone around her head that was turned on just loud enough to amplify her voice but not loud enough to scare the neighbours. I was impressed immediately, as sometimes on guided tours the presenter’s voice can become drowned out with other noises. I found out that it has only been in the last few years that Monterey Zoo actually became a non-profit zoological garden as before that for a long time it was a training facility for animals that appeared in movies, stages and on television. All the basic, cement-and-wire metal cages were simply holding pens for the animals when they were not touring or being featured elsewhere. As the modern world of cinema has used computer generated images instead of real animals, places with performing critters have understandably suffered.
The first 30 minutes of the tour is the old section of the zoo, which is nothing but tiny metal cages and what amounted to just about the worst zoo I’ve seen in my life. Clay Center Zoo in Kansas still has that title, but at Monterey Zoo there are species such as two leopards (a spotted and a black), African Lion, Caracal, Siberian Lynx, Spotted Hyena, Red Fox, Hamadryas Baboon, Ring-Tailed Lemur, Red Kangaroo, Capybara, Binturong, Patagonian Cavy, American Alligator and Brown Pelican in absolutely disgustingly tiny cages that are lacking enrichment, space or anything worthwhile. In just about every single example there is only the one animal; therefore, I mean one Capybara in a black bucket of water, one Spotted Hyena in a nasty little cement cage, etc. It is fascinating to be able to see the animals so close and the guide gushed forth a lot of information, but this part of the zoo is simply pitiful and downright disgraceful.
However, the good news is that there are a number of cages in the old part of the zoo that are sitting there empty: a trio of metal cages for bears that made me cringe to even imagine bears living in them, several primate cages, and several empty blocks where cages have been torn down and removed. As bad as this area currently is, the situation used to be much worse even up until 2014. The tour guide said that there came a point where a decision had to be made whether to abolish the idea of a zoo or radically transform the entire park into a non-profit venture and a “proper zoo”. The latter idea was chosen and things have altered considerably since then. A brand-new Warthog exhibit has been built and it is quite good and on top of that I was amazed to learn that every single day the Warthog is taken out for walks on a leash! A new Camelid pair of enclosures (Alpacas, Dromedaries, Llamas) has also been constructed near the zoo’s entrance. Elsewhere, the Binturong is removed daily and carried around as it is tame enough to pet, and the two elderly Ring-Tailed Lemurs both are leashed and even taken inside the main house to sleep at night if it gets too cold. Any visitors staying on-site in the “Safari Bungalows” get to meet an animal or two outside of its regular enclosure.
At the back of the zoo is a large paddock that the guide claims to be 5 acres in size, although it was difficult to ascertain the accuracy of that statement as all visitors had to stay behind a certain line and we only had the one clear angle of the habitat. Inside that exhibit are 4 African Elephants, an Ostrich, a Plains Zebra and 2 Asian Water Buffalo, all cohabiting together. For an extra fee of $7 per person, on top of the regular $15 for the guided tour, visitors can feed the elephants by standing back and allowing the trunks to do all the work. At this point the two tour groups merged and about half fed the elephants while the other half moved on to the last section of the zoo. I should make mention of the fact that it was quite extraordinary to see the zebra, ostrich and buffalo mingling with the 4 elephants and in terms of size the elephant paddock is certainly a very good one. However, there is only the one pool far away from visitors and only one very tiny shade structure in a bland, barren field.
The old part of the zoo was a disaster, then the Warthog and African Elephant exhibits perked things up a bit, but the final part of the zoo received huge praise from the crowd. There were cries of “wow…now we’re talking!...this is incredible…what a great zoo” as we walked up a sloping wooden ramp and entered the land of Oz. Lions, tigers, and bears, oh my! In August, 2015, two large tiger exhibits made their debut, then in April, 2016, two spacious lion exhibits opened to the public, and now in 2017 two bear enclosures completed Phase 1 of the brand-new Monterey Zoo. The guide announced to the whole crowd that what we were about to see was “bigger, better and much more modern than anything the San Francisco Zoo or Santa Barbara Zoo gives their carnivores” and I’d have to agree with her. The 6 new enclosures (2 for African Lions, 2 for American Black Bears, 2 for generic zoo tigers, including a white one) are essentially large black metal cages but these particular habitats have plenty of grass, hills of sand, climbing structures, pools and are quite spacious in size. I saw lions sleeping high on their wooden beams, a tiger splashing the edge of its pool, and bears rambling around the grass and I have to admit that the lion exhibits are miles better than anything at San Francisco Zoo, Santa Barbara Zoo and even the San Diego Zoo carnivore grottoes and Elephant Odyssey big cat enclosures. At Monterey there is even a series of extra-large, beautiful new signs, a small picnic area with a lion statue and a brand-new set of washrooms. Walking up to that higher level of the zoo was like walking into an entirely different facility. The 6 new enclosures are all functional but vast improvements on the tiny holding pens at the bottom of the hill and they wouldn’t look out of place at any major American zoo.
After a decade or more where basically nothing new happened at the zoo there has been substantial investment and the future looks a lot brighter. Now that there have been great new additions for tigers (2015), lions (2016) and black bears (2017), what is next for Monterey Zoo? I picked up a magazine in the zoo’s gift shop that has computer-generated images of a new leopard exhibit and a new Spotted Hyena habitat and the guide said that the plans and designs for those exhibits are finished and the zoo is now awaiting funding for the projects. There is a grand total of 51 acres of land and the old zoo was 5 acres and the plan is to turn Monterey Zoo into a 30-acre facility that is open on a daily basis with regular zoo hours. I think that if I had visited several years ago I would have been appalled but with the closing down of at least 8-9 old cages and the opening up of the excellent new section, now I’m eager to go back one day as long as the zoo continues its upward trajectory. I’m really hoping that plans don’t stall because if progress continues then this could be a nice little addition to anyone’s zoo trip itinerary and possibly a decent zoo in the future.
Zoo/Aquarium #15: Applegate Park Zoo
I raced 2.5 hours from the Monterey Zoo in Salinas in order to arrive in the city of Merced, an inland town one-hour north of Fresno, as I had slightly tweaked my itinerary and I knew that this zoo closed at 5:00. It is yet another in a long line of American zoos set inside a scenic public park and I suppose that proximity to park visitors is the only reason that some of these tiny places survive. At 4:30 I paid for my admission to Applegate Park Zoo but once inside I could relax as the establishment is a single loop that consists of less than 20 exhibits. The first enclosure was for a Cougar, panting in the 40 degree Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) heat. There were grassy yards for an African Spurred Tortoise and a Desert Tortoise, with only tiny wooden barriers maybe a foot high separating the public from the animals. The rest of the cast of characters consisted of a pacing American Black Bear in a tiny cement hellhole, a couple of Bobcats, at least 4 Raccoons, a skittish Coyote in a small enclosure, a Red Fox and a Grey Fox together, Alpacas, Mule Deer, an Emu, several swans and a few bird aviaries. In the end it took me about 20 minutes to see everything and so I doubled back just to kill some time and make sure that I was there at least half-an-hour. None of the exhibits are very good and with only a $3 admission fee I have no idea how this zoo even manages to stay open. There was a sign along the trail that said something along the lines that recent financial cutbacks had sliced the zookeeper budget by 50% and if anyone wanted to help out that the zoo was desperate for volunteers. This place needs all the help it can get.
Earlier on this trip I toured a couple of small facilities on the northern coast (Northcoast Marine Mammal Center and B. Bryan Preserve) and then I headed south to what is commonly referred to as the Bay Area. Here, at approximately the halfway point of California, is a confluence of 3 large cities (San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose) and within a loose circle are 15 “zoos” and I’ve now visited all of them, whether on this trip or on previous excursions through the state. There is a theme park (Six Flags), an African experience (Safari West Preserve) and several smaller sanctuaries, nature centers and kid-friendly, community-based establishments. Arguably the best of the lot is the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, a vast behemoth that cost $500 million when it opened in 2008 and within its bowels is the Steinhart Aquarium. Safari West is an enjoyable place to visit but costs a fortune and most of the animals can only be seen via a jeep tour. The next biggest and best could potentially be San Francisco Zoo as it receives almost one million annual visitors, but there is a lot about that facility that desperately needs to be renovated and/or bulldozed. Oakland Zoo is perhaps going to be the premier zoo in the region as of next year when the $70 million California Trails opens to complement what is a 3-hour, fairly solid little zoo. With the long-gestating California habitats set to bring in a boom in terms of visitor numbers, Oakland might be taking another step towards the big leagues.
In regards to San Francisco Zoo, a facility that I toured this week, I believe that what the establishment needs is the fundraising for a truly world-class addition. It needs a “Russia’s Grizzly Coast”, which saw Minnesota Zoo’s attendance shoot up to 1.3 million at that time and firmly placed that zoo on the radar amongst the best in the USA. Even small zoos can get a shot in the arm with the addition of a multi-acre, expensive new complex. Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, Texas, had Brazos River Country open slightly more than a decade ago and that part of the zoo is superb. Getting back to San Francisco, there needs to be less Band-Aid exhibits. The zoo has a patched-up South American building that was renovated and re-opened in 2015 but what is inside really isn’t that great. The ongoing overhaul of the WPA bear grottoes has been above average (Grizzly Gulch, Wolf Canyon, the upcoming American Black Bear exhibit) but all of those are tweaks to existing terrain. The Coquerel’s Sifaka exhibit is okay but nothing that will bring in the crowds, and the new playgrounds are wonderful for little kids but obviously there are no new animal exhibits in that area. San Francisco Zoo needs a statement exhibit and I would love to see something done with tigers. After a tiger attacked a keeper in 2006, and the tiger escape in 2007 that ended in tragedy, it would put a marker in the sand if Tiger Trek opened in a few years, a world-class habitat for a species that could be reclaimed by the zoo in a positive manner. A tiger habitat could even be the first step towards an Asian precinct, something that the zoo is lacking.
Here are the 15 “zoos” that I’ve visited that are all within an approximate 1.5-hour radius of the Bay Area:
Aquarium of the Bay (San Francisco)
California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco) - Steinhart Aquarium
California Raptor Center (Davis)
CuriOdyssey (San Mateo)
Folsom City Zoo Sanctuary (Folsom)
Happy Hollow Park & Zoo (San Jose) – visited twice, both times in 2011
Lindsay Wildlife Experience (Walnut Creek)
Marine Mammal Center (Sausalito)
Micke Grove Zoo (Lodi)
Oakland Zoo (Oakland)
Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo (Palo Alto)
Safari West Wildlife Preserve (Sonoma County)
San Francisco Zoo (San Francisco) – visited twice, 2006 and 2017
Six Flags Discovery Kingdom (Vallejo)
Sulphur Creek Nature Center (Hayward)
Now that I was done with the San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose trifecta, I headed along the coast to visit a couple of places that perhaps no other ZooChatter has ever been to.
Zoo/Aquarium #13: Seymour Marine Discovery Center
This establishment is located in Santa Cruz, about an hour south of San Jose and directly on the coastline of the Pacific Ocean. This small aquarium gets a 10 out of 10 for its magnificent setting, and before it opened I spent time checking out the fantastic, 87-foot long, mounted Blue Whale skeleton outside (one of the largest in the world), as well as seeing a mounted Grey Whale skeleton along a scenic walking path. Just a few feet from the edge of the trail is a precipitous cliff and far below was the crashing of the ocean on the rocks. There is a series of buildings here, with many researchers and oceanographers studying all sorts of marine-related items and this summer the parking lot is getting completely repaved and reconfigured and so all visitors have to park several blocks away. I truly wanted to love this place, with its amazing vista outside, its Monterey Bay Aquarium-style façade and location, the dozen workers and volunteers who were all eager to show me around and answer any questions that I had……BUT……
The truth is that Seymour Marine Discovery Center might be situated in a phenomenal setting with multiple buildings but in reality once you strip away the research labs, classrooms and ocean views there are only 2 large rooms and approximately 16 tanks on public display. Including wandering around outside I struggled to spend even 30 minutes here and at $8 it is a bit pricey considering what is on offer. The main entrance area is a grandiose room, with whale statues hanging from the ceiling and loads of information on coral research, climate change, coastal tides, animal facts, etc., but only a single tank with a couple of 4-foot long female Swell Sharks that can be petted. They are almost certainly the largest sharks that I’ve ever seen in a touch tank but even that did not open until 30 minutes after the aquarium opened…where is the logic in that? The second room had 15 tanks, including a long touch tank area and then a couple of rows of average-sized exhibits. Seeing a Red Octopus obtain its food from a glass bottle was pretty cool, as was the collection of Red Pelagic Crabs, and the Spotted Cusk-Eel, and even the Fat Innkeeper Worm in its see-through tube, but this facility is very small and the animals on offer are very few.
Zoo/Aquarium #14: Monterey Zoo
An hour south of Santa Cruz, and about half-an-hour from Monterey and its world-class aquarium, lies the inland city of Salinas and the somewhat infamous Monterey Zoo. This facility is closed to the public except for a daily one-hour tour that starts promptly at 1:00 and on some days in the summer there is a second, 3:00 tour. I arrived at this zoo with very low expectations as I’ve never met anyone who has visited and from what I’d seen online I didn’t have my hopes up. However, I always maintain that every single zoo is worth visiting at least once, partly because “it is there” but also because each zoo deserves an opportunity to reveal itself to an individual. I’ll visit any zoo once and there are hundreds of facilities that I’ll never go back to again but at least I gave them a shot. I found that Monterey Zoo was a real mixed-bag, with some atrocious cages but there is a wave of optimism that gave me hope for the future. The zoo has radically changed in the past 3 years as before that it was regarded as a roadside hellhole.
There were enough visitors signed up for the 1:00 tour so that we were all divided up into two groups, with a tour guide for each crowd. I travelled around in a cluster with about 20 others and our guide was a joke-cracking lady who wore a microphone around her head that was turned on just loud enough to amplify her voice but not loud enough to scare the neighbours. I was impressed immediately, as sometimes on guided tours the presenter’s voice can become drowned out with other noises. I found out that it has only been in the last few years that Monterey Zoo actually became a non-profit zoological garden as before that for a long time it was a training facility for animals that appeared in movies, stages and on television. All the basic, cement-and-wire metal cages were simply holding pens for the animals when they were not touring or being featured elsewhere. As the modern world of cinema has used computer generated images instead of real animals, places with performing critters have understandably suffered.
The first 30 minutes of the tour is the old section of the zoo, which is nothing but tiny metal cages and what amounted to just about the worst zoo I’ve seen in my life. Clay Center Zoo in Kansas still has that title, but at Monterey Zoo there are species such as two leopards (a spotted and a black), African Lion, Caracal, Siberian Lynx, Spotted Hyena, Red Fox, Hamadryas Baboon, Ring-Tailed Lemur, Red Kangaroo, Capybara, Binturong, Patagonian Cavy, American Alligator and Brown Pelican in absolutely disgustingly tiny cages that are lacking enrichment, space or anything worthwhile. In just about every single example there is only the one animal; therefore, I mean one Capybara in a black bucket of water, one Spotted Hyena in a nasty little cement cage, etc. It is fascinating to be able to see the animals so close and the guide gushed forth a lot of information, but this part of the zoo is simply pitiful and downright disgraceful.
However, the good news is that there are a number of cages in the old part of the zoo that are sitting there empty: a trio of metal cages for bears that made me cringe to even imagine bears living in them, several primate cages, and several empty blocks where cages have been torn down and removed. As bad as this area currently is, the situation used to be much worse even up until 2014. The tour guide said that there came a point where a decision had to be made whether to abolish the idea of a zoo or radically transform the entire park into a non-profit venture and a “proper zoo”. The latter idea was chosen and things have altered considerably since then. A brand-new Warthog exhibit has been built and it is quite good and on top of that I was amazed to learn that every single day the Warthog is taken out for walks on a leash! A new Camelid pair of enclosures (Alpacas, Dromedaries, Llamas) has also been constructed near the zoo’s entrance. Elsewhere, the Binturong is removed daily and carried around as it is tame enough to pet, and the two elderly Ring-Tailed Lemurs both are leashed and even taken inside the main house to sleep at night if it gets too cold. Any visitors staying on-site in the “Safari Bungalows” get to meet an animal or two outside of its regular enclosure.
At the back of the zoo is a large paddock that the guide claims to be 5 acres in size, although it was difficult to ascertain the accuracy of that statement as all visitors had to stay behind a certain line and we only had the one clear angle of the habitat. Inside that exhibit are 4 African Elephants, an Ostrich, a Plains Zebra and 2 Asian Water Buffalo, all cohabiting together. For an extra fee of $7 per person, on top of the regular $15 for the guided tour, visitors can feed the elephants by standing back and allowing the trunks to do all the work. At this point the two tour groups merged and about half fed the elephants while the other half moved on to the last section of the zoo. I should make mention of the fact that it was quite extraordinary to see the zebra, ostrich and buffalo mingling with the 4 elephants and in terms of size the elephant paddock is certainly a very good one. However, there is only the one pool far away from visitors and only one very tiny shade structure in a bland, barren field.
The old part of the zoo was a disaster, then the Warthog and African Elephant exhibits perked things up a bit, but the final part of the zoo received huge praise from the crowd. There were cries of “wow…now we’re talking!...this is incredible…what a great zoo” as we walked up a sloping wooden ramp and entered the land of Oz. Lions, tigers, and bears, oh my! In August, 2015, two large tiger exhibits made their debut, then in April, 2016, two spacious lion exhibits opened to the public, and now in 2017 two bear enclosures completed Phase 1 of the brand-new Monterey Zoo. The guide announced to the whole crowd that what we were about to see was “bigger, better and much more modern than anything the San Francisco Zoo or Santa Barbara Zoo gives their carnivores” and I’d have to agree with her. The 6 new enclosures (2 for African Lions, 2 for American Black Bears, 2 for generic zoo tigers, including a white one) are essentially large black metal cages but these particular habitats have plenty of grass, hills of sand, climbing structures, pools and are quite spacious in size. I saw lions sleeping high on their wooden beams, a tiger splashing the edge of its pool, and bears rambling around the grass and I have to admit that the lion exhibits are miles better than anything at San Francisco Zoo, Santa Barbara Zoo and even the San Diego Zoo carnivore grottoes and Elephant Odyssey big cat enclosures. At Monterey there is even a series of extra-large, beautiful new signs, a small picnic area with a lion statue and a brand-new set of washrooms. Walking up to that higher level of the zoo was like walking into an entirely different facility. The 6 new enclosures are all functional but vast improvements on the tiny holding pens at the bottom of the hill and they wouldn’t look out of place at any major American zoo.
After a decade or more where basically nothing new happened at the zoo there has been substantial investment and the future looks a lot brighter. Now that there have been great new additions for tigers (2015), lions (2016) and black bears (2017), what is next for Monterey Zoo? I picked up a magazine in the zoo’s gift shop that has computer-generated images of a new leopard exhibit and a new Spotted Hyena habitat and the guide said that the plans and designs for those exhibits are finished and the zoo is now awaiting funding for the projects. There is a grand total of 51 acres of land and the old zoo was 5 acres and the plan is to turn Monterey Zoo into a 30-acre facility that is open on a daily basis with regular zoo hours. I think that if I had visited several years ago I would have been appalled but with the closing down of at least 8-9 old cages and the opening up of the excellent new section, now I’m eager to go back one day as long as the zoo continues its upward trajectory. I’m really hoping that plans don’t stall because if progress continues then this could be a nice little addition to anyone’s zoo trip itinerary and possibly a decent zoo in the future.
Zoo/Aquarium #15: Applegate Park Zoo
I raced 2.5 hours from the Monterey Zoo in Salinas in order to arrive in the city of Merced, an inland town one-hour north of Fresno, as I had slightly tweaked my itinerary and I knew that this zoo closed at 5:00. It is yet another in a long line of American zoos set inside a scenic public park and I suppose that proximity to park visitors is the only reason that some of these tiny places survive. At 4:30 I paid for my admission to Applegate Park Zoo but once inside I could relax as the establishment is a single loop that consists of less than 20 exhibits. The first enclosure was for a Cougar, panting in the 40 degree Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) heat. There were grassy yards for an African Spurred Tortoise and a Desert Tortoise, with only tiny wooden barriers maybe a foot high separating the public from the animals. The rest of the cast of characters consisted of a pacing American Black Bear in a tiny cement hellhole, a couple of Bobcats, at least 4 Raccoons, a skittish Coyote in a small enclosure, a Red Fox and a Grey Fox together, Alpacas, Mule Deer, an Emu, several swans and a few bird aviaries. In the end it took me about 20 minutes to see everything and so I doubled back just to kill some time and make sure that I was there at least half-an-hour. None of the exhibits are very good and with only a $3 admission fee I have no idea how this zoo even manages to stay open. There was a sign along the trail that said something along the lines that recent financial cutbacks had sliced the zookeeper budget by 50% and if anyone wanted to help out that the zoo was desperate for volunteers. This place needs all the help it can get.
