8 Great Places for Animal Encounters
Hand-feed breakfast to a wallaby, take giraffes for a jaunt, learn animal care alongside a zookeeper, and watch penguins at play as they dive and explore a 326,000 aquatic area. Experience all this and more when you go behind the scenes on these Michigan zoo adventures.
Binder Park Zoo, Battle Creek
Sign up to be zookeeper for a day and shadow animal care staff.
Make the rounds Hold a snake and pet a hissing cockroach (oddly, one of the zoo’s cleanest creatures; they groom obsessively). Or meet Fuzz and Finnegan, a pair of ring-tailed lemurs, whose diet consists of fruits and veggies.
Take giraffes for a walk Walk Hulka and the other giraffes from the Savanna Barn to the 18-acre Wild Africa exhibit. Giraffes are easily distracted, so to reward them for staying on the path, hold out a sassafras branch for them to eat from.
Inspire animal artists Collaborate with armadillos and smaller animals (such as rabbits) on abstract art. Use broccoli and berries to entice them to hop, crawl or stomp in nontoxic paint and onto a blank canvas. The zoo sells the finished pieces at fund-raisers.
Meet and greet Say hi to the new lions: Salem, Shelby and Enzi. Each eats 4 to 9 pounds of raw meat per day. Drop in on Al, an 80-year-old Aldabra tortoise weighing more than 550 pounds. You can touch his shell as he lumbers by.
Have a safari sleepover Spend the night in Wild Africa. Have a live animal encounter and sleep in an authentic African tented camp.
John Ball Zoo, Grand Rapids
Get close to the animals in this zookeeper program.
Serve breakfast to beasts Hand-feed wallabies a breakfast of carrots and apple chunks, and then hide a treat like honey for them to find. Scoop up live crickets for the bullfrogs, and create a custom snack mix for the spider monkeys using toasted O’s cereal, peanut butter, dried cherries and more.
Schedule a close encounter Through the zoo’s Close Encounters program, join a zookeeper for a focused experience, such as leaving sweet potatoes for the brown bears, watching a chimp training session or learning to handle ambassador animals—parrots, snakes, owls and opossums.
Sneak a Peek sessions offer 30- to 45-minute behind-the-scenes tours of the zoo’s Under the Sea or African Savannah exhibits.
Oswald’s Bear Ranch, Newberry
Elevated platforms offer great views and photo ops of more than three dozen black bears.
Museum Ship Valley Camp, Sault Ste. Marie
Check out 1,200-gallon aquariums stocked with Great Lakes fish species.
Potter Park Zoo, Lansing
Shady walkways lead past nearly 600 residents, including rare Amur tigers, red pandas and black rhinos at Michigan’s oldest zoo.
Wilderness Trails Zoo, Birch Run
Use a treat stick to feed a parakeet at this smaller zoo that’s home to a big variety of creatures, including a Bengal tiger, lemurs and zebras.
Detroit Zoo, Royal Oak
Mingle with the Macaronis - guest receive a behind the scenes tour of our Polk Penguin Conservation Center's penguin husbandry area and have the opportunity to learn, feed and interact with the penquins.
Breakfast with your Favorite Animal - guest get to choose which Detroit Zoo animal they'd like to have breakfast with. They receive a private keeper chat and animal enrichment where the animal will eat alongside them. If guests chose giraffes or Butterflies specifically, they have an opportunity to interact or have the animal interact with them.
Resident Reptile - groups get a behind the scenes tour of the Holden Reptile Conservation Center and see some of the zoo's reptiles up close.
Sea Life Michigan, Auburn Hills
A touch pool and 180-degree tunnel put you close to sharks, stingrays, jellyfish and seahorses.
Unleash your animal instincts at a Michigan zoo or aquarium.
By Gary Thompson