At the beginning of the month, for my birthday weekend, Jeff took me to Oglebay. There’s lots to do at there and, despite it not looking like too impressive of a zoo on paper, my first choice was to visit Good Zoo. They have 50 species of animals that reside on their 30 acre property. It’s a fairly small zoo but it was easily one of my favorites. Jeff and I spent nearly three hours here. We zoo-ed, HARD. I think I might have had more fun at this little tiny zoo than I ever have at a zoo before.

I think what I enjoyed most about the zoo was how close you could get to the animals! It wasn’t just “wow, look at that cool animal”, a lot of them you were suuuper close to! The kangaroos, for example, are in a large pen that you can enter. You have to stay on the path but the only thing between you and kangaroos is a small rope. So basically these beautiful creatures are an arms length away, and you have to have crazy strong self control to not try and pet one. 

Beside the kangaroo habitat is an aviary filled with rainbow lorikeets. I was a bit hesitant to enter since I’m not really the biggest fan of birds. I refused to hold one (mostly because I watched them poop all over other people and didn’t really want to deal with that) but Jeff quickly made a friend. This silly little bird would not stop licking him. Jeff would reach his hand up for the bird to walk onto but instead it would bite him then resume licking the sweat off his head and neck. I have a huge number of hilarious/creepy photos of that bird licking him. It was really hard to choose which ones to share.

After walking the entire zoo and then riding the train around the zoo we circled back around to some of the first exhibits. Sometimes it takes me a while to get into the groove of photographing things, especially when other people are around. That plus the fact I really really wanted to see the golden lion tamarins and meerkats again! While I loved basically every single animal I saw these two were my favorites. I’ve been to more than a handful of zoos, how did I never realize how darn cute these guys are!? The tamarins especially! I was actually crying watching them play. Yep, just a few hours shy of turning twenty five and I’m standing in front of a monkey exhibit crying over how cute they are. I could have watched them play all day. I hope I get to meet one some day.

Yeah, so basically the Good Zoo rules. They even offer animal encounters where you can go inside the exhibits with a trainer and feed the animals. There was a couple doing that with the ring-tailed lemurs while we were there. Needless to say, Jeff and I were both green with envy. Maybe another time…
xoxo