The Little Zoo that Could!

On our recent trip to Orange Beach we decided to visit the zoo. We hadn’t been before, so off to the zoo we went with face masks on and camera in hand. We had to wear our face masks in any of the closed areas, but not while walking around the zoo.

The zoo has recently moved to a larger location a little further from the gulf. The previous location was in an area of Gulf Shores that got lots of storm surge during hurricanes. Hopefully with them being a little further out it will help with some of those issues. I couldn’t image having to load up all of those animals to evacuate.

We spent about an hour at the zoo taking our time and photographing the animals. Some of them are in enclosures with wire with small holes so those don’t photograph as well. They have a variety of animals: goats, monkey’s, giraffe’s, tigers, lion, birds, kangaroos, turtles, alligators, lemurs, etc. They did have a reptile house, but I avoid those, I don’t do snakes.

I got excited when we got to the butterfly house. I love photographing butterflies, imagine my disappointment when I got inside and found that they were all preserved butterflies. There were no live fluttering butterflies.

We were there after Halloween and a lot of the animals had pumpkins. The parrots were trying to get inside their pumpkin. The lion was scratching hers up.

There is a soaring ride that went across the park, but it wasn’t open. Probably because we were there during the off season. There is also a restaurant there, but again we were there early. We didn’t check the hours to see if it was going to be open later,. There was also a barn that wasn’t open to walk thru. Not sure if it was because we were there so early in the day or if there was training or something going on. We assumed you could walk thru since there was a monkey enclosure inside that we couldn’t see from outside. There were several people inside feeding the animals, but the animals were not in their outside areas yet. We did see the goat in one of the outside areas.

We recommend that if you are in the area that you pay a visit to the zoo.

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