A Day At The Cincinnati Zoo

My entire family are animal lovers – my mother in particular was passionate about the animal kingdom.  So naturally, we love to visit any sort of aquarium, wildlife park, or zoo whenever we have the opportunity.  Fortunately for us, we live only about 40 minutes from one of the best zoos in the United States – the Cincinnati Zoo.  Prior to our recent visit, it’s been about 4 years since our last trip to the Cincinnati Zoo – we’re definitely overdue for a visit!  So I packed up my photo gear (7D, 70-200 f2.8L IS with 1.4 Extender, and 5D Mark II with 24-105 f4.0L) and we drove on down to the zoo.  Be sure to click on the below photos for a larger, gallery view.

Before I get into my zoo photos, I thought it would be worthwhile mentioning that there is a Cincinnati Zoo app available for the iPhone:

I was most excited about the map feature, but was a bit let down by it.  Basically, it’s a top-down version of the same paper map you get when you enter the park.  The advantage over the paper map is that it does have a dot which shows your current position on the map.  My HOPE was that you could tell the app where you wanted to go within the zoo, and it would give you some guidance as to how to get there from your current position.  No such luck.  The app was slow to load too, and obviously had not been given an iOS 4.0 multi-task API.  So using a paper map was almost quicker and easier.  Perhaps it will get some improvements down the road.

The zoo itself has changed considerably since my last visit.  Here’s the new visitor center:

And here’s the new gate into the zoo:

The first animal my son an I saw was this beautiful bird not far from the entrance:

Here’s a few more good shots I got during our zoo visit:

Overall we had a very enjoyable day together – great “father and son” time.  Most of the day was quite overcast, which is really the most enjoyable time to walk around and look at the animals – the low 90’s temperature during this time was quite pleasant.  I think we covered more ground and saw more animals than any other visit to the zoo I’ve made.  Conversely, the overcast conditions were not optimal for photo taking, so this wasn’t my best trip to the zoo from a photo taking perspective.  By about 1:30, the clouds broke, and the temperature rose considerably, so we left by about 3pm.

For more information about the Cincinnati Zoo, please click here to visit their website.  If it has been a while since you visited, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by all the changes.