The Bronx Zoo - a Great Day in the Wild

I recently spent a day at the Bronx Zoo with my kids and another family. The zoo spans 265 acres and is home to over 4,000 animals. It's simply too expansive to cover all of the exhibits in one day with your kids. This is one of the best kids' attractions in New York City.

We were able to cover some of the more popular exhibits. First we visited the Butterfly Garden. The butterflies live in a lush rainforest-like meadow inside a greenhouse. There were butterflies of all colors flying close enough to you to snap some great pictures. According to the zoo's website (www.bronxzoo.com), over 1000 butterflies flutter around.

The building smelled beautiful and you can inhale the scents of the snapdragon, lilac and other native New York wildflowers and shrubs. We also saw a rooster roaming free amongst the butterflies. A glass-windowed butterfly laboratory shows butterflies in their cocoons, ready to hatch. We didn't see any butterflies being born but it was fascinating.

The next stop was The World of Darkness. This is the building which houses the nighttime creatures who live in caves. We saw sand cats, a two-toed sloth, a sand boa, broad-nosed caimans, and the world's only nocturnal monkey, the douroucouli. We loved the bats and the glowing scorpion. My kids were scared of the dark so we rushed through this exhibit.

We then backtracked to The Congo Gorilla Forest, which is near the Butterfly Garden. The gorillas and other African animals live in the wild replica of the Congo forest while the visitors wander through an enclosed building and view the animals through a glass wall. The Congo environment is 6.5 acres and has approximately 400 animals which represent 55 species. We loved watching the gorillas and admired the babies following their mothers around the forest.

Our last stop of the day was the Children's Zoo. This exhibit takes a long, long time due to the kids stopping to play at every attraction and wanting to look at every animal. This area wanders through a woodland edge, a marsh, a forest and a desert. Some of the animals we encountered were ducks, geese, wallabies, snakes, goats and sheep.

In the Children's Zoo, the children can climb through a tunnel and pop their head through the ground into a plastic-enclosed tube to see the prairie dogs at ground level. The kids enjoyed playing on a giant spider web made of rope. They also liked the tree slide (a two level enclosed slide which looks like a tree trunk).

This is what we accomplished in one day. Next time, we plan on taking a ride on the Wild Asia Monorail. This is a safari ride on a monorail train. On the ride, you can view the animals which are native to the forests of Asia. You can see elephants, rhinos, sambar deer, antelopes, and Indo-Chinese tigers.

We'll also stop by to see the grizzly bears named Archie, Betty, and Veronica. These bears we sent to the zoo from Wyoming and Montana as part of a rescue effort in 1995.

The free map given out at the zoo is detailed and gives you an idea of the most popular exhibits to see first. For more information, visit www.bronxzoo.com.