Beardsley Zoo

We headed to Beardsley Zoo this weekend.  It was a "new" zoo that we had not yet traveled to and we thought it would be a fun way to spend our Saturday.  Ian decided to head to work with his grandfather instead so we just had the younger two; who love learning about animals!

It was fun, but it was a much smaller zoo than I had pictured... I'm not sure why I pictured it to be so much bigger; they do have a map online and we had looked at it before going.  It was laid out nicely and very clean too.

We had a great time!

We were greeted with this large world sculpture 

Close up we saw that the animals were all carved into the continents on which they are found! 

Condors 

Measuring his arm span against the condor's wingspan 

 They have a greenhouse and we enjoyed looking at all the exotic plants.

My kids were quite impressed with this African Milk Tree 

We thought this plant reminded us of brains or coral 

Alec told us all about how this pitcher plant works 

There was a large Koi pond in the middle of the greenhouse 

We had no idea that we would see so many neat and unusual plants.  Once we finished up in the greenhouse we headed off to see all of the animals. 

Learning about the rat snake 

Ocelot 

Black marsh turtle also known as the smiling turtle 

Evan talking to the guinea hens 

Amur Leopard 

Lynx 

Evan's favorite was the otter; isn't he cute?!

They were so playful too. 

There were tunnels for the kids to go INSIDE the prairie dog town 

 

How do you measure up to the world's penguins 

Our last stop was the carousel; we didn't ride it but we did look at the various animals depicted on the zoo's carousel.  They had a panda bear, a puffin and other assorted animals.  All around the carousel they had a carousel museum set up.  The boys enjoyed studying the various horses and picked their favorite out of each group.  Alec pointed out that most every horse in the museum had real hair for the tail instead of the sculpted and painted ones that we see now a days.

It was a fun trip but the zoo was pretty small so we were able to cover the whole thing in two hours.  There was also a small playground, a few garden paths to wander through (like the sculpture garden we didn't see listed on the map until after we left!).  There were so many signs  and we learned a lot about animals by reading them and talking to various docents.