Animal Adventures at Boulder Ridge

This week the girls and I went on an adventure. How is that different than any other week, you ask? It's not. We go on lots of adventures. But this one felt especially adventurous because there were wild animals involved!

Way out in Alto, Michigan, there is a new wild animal park - Boulder Ridge. We decided to check it out... and let me tell you, this place is way cool. It's inexpensive and well worth it - we had such a fun day! Of course, my kids are animal and adventure fanatics (kind of like their mom...) so anything to do with animals is always fun for us. 

Boulder Ridge doesn't look like much from the road - situated in between corn fields like it is, it kind of just looks like another farm. But once you get inside, you don't feel like you're on a farm at all. It's 80 acres or so of wild animal habitats! There is a large walk-around area that houses the smaller exotics and lots of hands-on experiences, like the parakeet aviary and the pygmy goat petting zoo. You can get really up close to everything, including some huge old alligators and tortoises!

The girls loved the exotic birds. Parrots, macaws, parakeets, and some funky looking pigeons and lovebirds.

The kangaroos were cool to watch! I didn't get a picture of them hopping all around, but they were pretty active while we were there. There was a joey chasing his mama, trying to get back in her pouch, but she wouldn't let him. It's amazing how kangaroos use their tails like another leg. These were all pretty small... I can imagine a full-grown kanga would be intimidating!

 Without a doubt, the highlight of the day for the girls was the parakeet aviary. It was huge and full of birds - hundreds of them. You buy a stick of seed if you want, and then when you go in, you get flocked. Leah was beyond delighted with the aviary, especially when a parakeet landed right on her head! Susie had a hard time keeping still enough for the birds to come to her, but one landed on her head too, which resulted in shrieks of delight and a great whoosh of retreating birds.

 This was Leah's favorite bird. One of them, anyway. :-)

We must have stayed in the aviary for an hour, and I think I spent $10 on bird seed sticks. Leah could have stayed in there all day. She loved it.

But finally Susie and I talked her into leaving so we could go see the other animals.

Like the pygmy goats you could also feed for a dollar. Susie was a little shy of the nibble-y goats, but Leah, of course, fed them happily.

You have noticed, by now, that Leah is wearing her swim goggles as a necklace. I bought those for her a week and a half ago, and she hasn't taken them off this whole time.

That girl is going to be an olympic swimmer, but that's another post for another day!

Leah tried especially hard to make sure the baby goats got her food. They were darn cute.

Throughout the summer, Boulder Ridge tries to keep other exotic babies that are born at the park in the petting zoo area, bottle raising them, so people can get up close looks at "wild" animals. Later on, the babies are sold to other zoos around the country, and the funds are used to help conserve wild species around the globe.

At least, this is what they told us on the bus tour. I'm not totally sure how I feel about it, but I'm not a zoologist. They do have many endangered species at Boulder Ridge, so I suppose it's better to have them protected and procreating in captivity than dying out in the wild.

In the petting zoo when we were there was a baby Asian cow. It was cool. All the female zebras at Boulder Ridge are pregnant right now, so they are hoping for a baby zebra in the petting zoo soon.

I am sure the one male zebra at the park has an inflated ego.

Tortoises are easy to get a picture of because they don't move much. This guy was in an "enclosure" right off the sidewalk... you could reach out and touch him if you wanted! Very up close and personal. :-)

 Susie spent quite some time chatting with this fellow. They're both pretty talkative, so they had a long conversation while Leah was busy feeding the baby goats. At the point I took these pictures, the bird was doing sommersaults to impress Susie. He even said "Uh-Oh!" before purposefully falling off his perch onto his back on the bottom of the cage. Susie was ecstatic!

Some of the other animals in the walk-around areas...

 And then, just when you thought you'd seen all there was to see, you get on a safari bus for a tour of the outback.

Out here was where all the large animals were, like the musk ox, bison, water buffalo, ostrich, antelope, etc.

We went on the bus tour twice. It was that cool. I've already got a ton of pictures into this post, so I won't post all the pictures Leah took while we were on the bus... these are just a few.

And at the very end of our day, I said "Hey girls! Put your heads together so I can take your picture!" and this is what I got.

Don't let them fool you - it was a fantastically fun adventure. A great day! We'll definitely go back.

Lots of memories made...