Visiting the Lowery Park Zoo

On our first full day of vacation we decided to head to the Lowery Park Zoo.  We had bought Tampa city passes that got us into quite a few Tampa attractions and we found them to be such a great deal (money wise) and they were so easy to use!

We walked right to the prepaid ticket gate and walked right in. This 56 acre zoo was a fun way to kick off our vacation.

All the animals are divided into lands-- Asian gardens, Walleroo station, Savannah reserve, Florida Wildlife and Primate world. Everything was so clean and many of the animal enclosures were quite large. 

The Anoa; we had never heard of this animal! 

The sloth bear; an animal we had never seen at any other zoo before!  The sucking noise the bear makes when eating insects can be heard from miles and miles away! 

There were encounter programs going on all day and the boys got ask lots of questions about the sloth bear, tough the fur of the bear, and see the claws up close.  

Much of the park was shaded and had raised boardwalks for following the trail 

Gharial; this was one scary looking reptile! 

Alec was beyond thrilled to see a clouded leopard! 

He had to stop and read the WHOLE sign.  

The rays weren't feeding at the time we were there but we still got to pet them. 

No trip to Florida would be complete without seeing a few manatees and they had quite a lot in their giant tank. 

I was thrilled to get to see an orangutan; there were even a few really cute babies in the enclosure.  It's so sad to think these giants are going extinct.  Watching them climb and move was quite amazing. They are so hairy and big and yet they move with such ease.

Evan's favorite was the lion tamarin. They are so tiny!

Another "new to us" animal-- the titi monkey

We could go in, up close to the 

The boys posing with the fruit bats

We could not wait to head into the Safari area and ride their expedition Africa ride.  The ride buggy took us right out into the safari area so we could get a close up view of many of the animals.  The only disappointment to our day was the fact that the giraffes were not interested in eating by the time we made it back to their exhibit.  I had REALLY REALLY wanted to feed a giraffe.

On the safari ride

We got to learn all about servals with this animal encounter.  There are over 100 animals that the zoo keeps for animal encounters, school trips, and outreach programs that are not available for viewing in the zoo and the serval was one of them.  The boys were thrilled to watch him eat, jump, and pounce.  Alec may have had a couple of questions (OK a dozen or so) for the trainers.

In one leap he jumped from the ground up to the top of those boxes!

Evan was thrilled that on our second pass through wallaroo station the koalas were back on exhibit.

Our last stop was the bird center and even though we didn't choose to buy any food for them a couple of them flew right to my husband!

We had so much fun learning about and seeing so many new animals.