Places to take your kids before they grow up - ZOOs

By Frommer's 500 Places to Take Your Kids Before They Grow Up
San Diego Zoo
As the mother of a panda fanatic, I knew we had to go to the San Diego Zoo, one of only three zoos in the U.S. with those black-and-white giant pandas. More than 4,000 creatures live at the San Diego Zoo, including rare species like the Buerger’s tree kangaroos of New Guinea, long-billed kiwis from New Zealand, wild Przewalski’s horses from Mongolia, lowland gorillas from Africa and giant tortoises from the Galápagos. Even better, we saw them in naturalistic habitats, brilliantly designed not only to make the animals comfortable but also to give zoogoers some pretty close-up views. My favorite parts, actually, were the immense aviaries, where you could stand on a boardwalk and peer into a jungle canopy to spy parrots and lorikeets and other gaudy tropical birds. (My husband would vote for the polar bears. We had a very hard time getting him to leave that enclosure.)San Diego’s is a surprisingly old zoo for a West Coast institution: It was launched in 1916 by Dr. Harry Wegeforth, a shrewd zoologist who traveled around the world bartering native southwestern animals like rattlesnakes and sea lions—a dime a dozen in California but glamorous overseas—for more exotic foreign species. He also brought back plants from every locale where animals were acquired, ensuring that their new habitations could be landscaped to feel like home. San Diego was one of the first zoos to separate animals from humans with moats instead of bars, and it has long been active in conservation efforts around the world, as well as breeding programs for endangered species. We were glad we invested in the value package, which allowed us to hop a ride on an express bus and take a cross-zoo trip on the cable car. But now I wish we’d had time for the two-in-one package that adds on the zoo’s sister facility, the sprawling San Diego Wild Animal Park, 34 miles north of San Diego in Escondido. Here, many of the animals roam freely in vast enclosures, allowing giraffes and ostriches to interact with antelopes and zebras, much as they would in Africa. Humans navigate the distances via monorail cars, walking tours or pricey-but-unforgettable photo caravans. Grrr.
Brookfield Zoo
While there’s something sweet and cozy about the Lincoln Park Zoo in town—which is, after all, the nation’s oldest zoo—Chicago-area kids know that the real animal-watching takes place 14 miles west of the Loop (close enough you can get here by Metra train) at the Brookfield Zoo. With 216 acres to stretch out in, the zoo’s thousands of animal residents have roomy naturalistic environments, with entire ecosystems set up for several species living together (or next door to each other, if they are predator and prey).
Brookfield always seems to be coming up with new immersive exhibits. One of the zoo’s newest nooks is Wolf Woods, built for a pack of endangered Mexican gray wolves as part of a joint conservation effort with a number of other zoos. The Fragile Kingdom is divided into two environments—one for the desert, where porcupines, meerkats and sandcats scurry around, one for the equally fragile Asian rainforest, where clouded leopards and Amur tigers (the new name for Siberian tigers) prowl and slink around their enclosures, with binturongs, Prevost’s squirrels and small-clawed otters stashed safely across the way. The Habitat Africa exhibit alone covers 30 acres, more than the entire Lincoln Park Zoo; okapis browse in a forest area, illustrating why stripes work for them better than the sun-dappled colors of their giraffe cousins stalking around the savanna section.The minute you get to the zoo, buy your tickets to the perennially popular dolphin show at the Seven Seas Panorama. You’ll also want to stop in at the muggy Tropic World, where you can walk at treetop level with mangabeys, mandrills and gibbons chattering on either side, and the Australia House, where fruit bats flit around your head. Kids gravitate to Baboon Island, where a troupe of some 40 guinea baboons groom and grimace at each other.
Cincinnati Zoo
Every one of its exhibits demonstrates the whole delicate balance of an ecosphere, the entwined roles of predator and prey, the interplay between plant and animal life (the zoo is also a lush botanical garden, with over 3,000 thriving plant species). An old Taj Mahal–inspired elephant house has been redesigned to demonstrate how dwindling habitats affect supersized species like the Asian elephant, the giraffe and the okapi. But one of the most important buildings hasn’t got a single animal inside: It’s a vintage Japanese-style pagoda that’s now a memorial to Martha, a passenger pigeon who died here in 1914, the very last of her once-ubiquitous species (the last Carolina parakeet also died here). The nation’s second-oldest zoo (opened in 1875), the Cincinnati park has only 75 acres, but that makes it all the more walkable for younger children. With no room to expand, Cincinnati’s designers have ingeniously packed as much as possible onto its acres, with 500-plus species housed in naturalistic environments. Among the endangered species here are white lions (courtesy of Las Vegas animal trainers Siegfried & Roy), fork-tongued Komodo dragons, shy red pandas and lumbering manatees. The stars of the show, though, are the Sumatran rhinoceroses, glossy brown armored creatures that are the only ones of their species to successfully breed in captivity, a feat even more rare than the breeding of a giant panda cub.One of the most popular parts of the children’s zoo is the nursery, where kids crowd around to see the newest zoo babies being hand-fed by zoo staff. The Jungle Trails, a walk-through simulated rainforest, allows visitors to get a good look at orangutans, gibbons, and bonobos; outdoors, there’s a monkey island where you walk on a wooden bridge while acrobatic gibbons nonchalantly hoot and dangle on the wooden structure around you. It’s the only zoo I know of with an entire exhibit focusing on insects, from the emperor scorpion to the leaf-cutter ant—and why not? Insects, too, are part of the great chain of life.