I actually arrived about an hour before checkin to my yurt, so I hung out for a while in the building with the gift shop and the restaurant. It was a good first night. After checking in and settling into my yurt where I really roughed it with electricity and air conditioning, I eventually hung out for a while in the Nomad Ridge common area with other guests. We watched the Père David's Deer bucks herding and courting the does, and we even witnessed a tussle between two bucks. As my vacation began I felt quite relaxed but my BP the next morning was 129/80, a bit higher than usual. Stress is not just for when the shit hits the fan, you know. My second day there I did two Wildside tours. The Wildside tours are different from the open-air bus tours. The bus tours, which themselves a great, stay on the roads in each of the sectioned off compounds. Often the animals in each pasture are close to the road, but not always. Occasionally they will wandered close to the bus, as did the herd of Southern White Rhinos on my first visit to The Wilds in 2019. But on a Wildside tour you are in a small truck with a bed that seats about six people, and the tour guide goes off the road and drives into the herds or otherwise gets up close to the animals. In a few cases, such as with the giraffes and the Great One-horned Asian Rhino, you can even hand feed them ‐‐ lettuce leaves for the giraffes, various fruit pieces for the rhino. My morning wildside tour was with a young lady, whose name I have long forgotten. We passengers fed both the giraffes and the black rhino and got up close to many animal. In the afternoon, the Wildside tour was more specialized. It was titled "Wildside Tour: Secrets iof the Zoo." The specialized part always depends on what projects the animal management teams have going. For this tour it was really that our guide was Cody Cseplo, who is one of the Wilds/Columbus Zoo staff members frequently featured on the Animal Planet network show, The Secret Life of the Zoo. Cody is also a member of the International Rhino Keeper Association. Two big highlights of the afternoon tour were when Cody took us into the heard of White Rhinos and into the the herd of Sichuan Takins, the latter, while perched on a particularly slanted hill ‐‐ seriously, I thought our truck might tip over sideways. During the afternoon excursion we were able to again feed the giraffes, but the Asian rhino was in a mud pond and it was sweltering hot, and she did not with to come out and amble up to the truck. The white rhinos, by the way, are strictly grazers so there's no practical way for folk to hand feed them. But they are pretty docile and friendly. Cody, who they know, was able to leave the truck and mingle with them, though at one point he did suddenly exit from the midst of them to the other side of the truck from where they were. When he did so, he explained, "Two of the males are starting to get pissy with each other and I do not want to be in the middle of that." There turned out to not be a tussle between those two males, but, who can blame Cody for his caution? A few other animals that we got up-close to were the Persian donkey onager, the Bactrian camel, the Banteng Buffalo, the Dhole dog, Fringe-eared oryx the Scemitar oryx, and the Prezewalski's wild horse. My last morning, I ended my stay with an open-air bus tour, which ended just before the heavy rain storm, that had been threatening to hit during my whole stay, finally hit. Just in time for me to hit the road for the next leg of my vacation, in Hocking Hills.

The following photos only have a slight bit of correct chronology to them. Mostly they are presented in alphabetical order by name of animal, though I do show a few things out of that order.
	Outside shot of my yurt.	The yurt interior.
The yurt interior, again.	The portable AC unit in the yurt.	My music equipment ‐‐ not used during my Wilds stay, by-the-way, but there just in case.
The gas fire pit at the Nomad Ridge common area.	Some Père David's Deer bucks.
More shots of the Père David's Deer.
African White Rhinos.
The shade shelter for the rhinos.		A rhino sharpens its horn on the jeep bumper.
Rhinos in the mud.
More rhinos.
Open air tour bus behind the rhinos.	Mama and young rhino.	Young rhino checking us out.
More rhinos.
More rhinos.
Cody Cseplo talking to us about his rhino buddies.	Cody, hanging with his rhino buddies.
Cody, again, hanging with his African White Rhino buddies.	Asian Rhino coming over for some snacks during the morning Wildside tour.
Snacks! Snacks! Snacks! And she even let me pet her.
Mother & daughter came to visit, then went back to their pond.		Cody, in the afternoon Wildside Tour, cutting up fruit to feed to the Asian rhinos.
But it was pretty hot that afternoon, and the rhinos would not leave the comfort of their pond,
A Bactrian camel and a couple Persian onagers by an open air tour bus.	Bactrian camel.
Bactrian camels.		Brian, the driver/tour guide on my open air bus tour, the finale of my stay.
From Bactrian camels to Bactrian deer
Banteng buffalo.
Two pics of the Wilds' cheetah, from two different tours during my stay.		Dhole dog ‐‐ which I could easily mistake for some species of fox.
Dhole dog.	Fringe-eared Oryx.
Fringe-eared Oryx.
But of course we dropped in to say hello and feed the giraffes on both the Wildside tours.
The giraffes are shy about being touched, but they have no trouble at all accepting those lettuce pieces from one's hand.
....no trouble at all.
....none.
	The morning Wildside tour guide, Kristin.	An ostrich about to peck on Kritin's boot, which she said happens all the time.
Cody, out with the ostrich during the afternoon Wildside tour.	According to Kristin, during the morning Wildside tour, The Wild's has ostriches not because they are endangered but because Jack Hanna, who was instrumental in getting The Wilds up and running, likes ostriches and thought they would be a good addition to the preserve.
	Parakeet Landing, where you can feed the birds, at $1.00 a pop for a stick with, if I remember correctly, a smidgen of peanut butter with bird seed embedded in it.
		An open air tour bus.
A herd of Persian Onagers.
If I remember correctly, the Persian Onagers bray the way that donkeys do. They are, I believe, in the same genus ‐‐ but don't quote me on that, I am not a mamalian biologist nor an expert in the field in any sense of the term.		This sign is outside the enclosure for the African Wild Dogs, who were all sheltering in the shade, so I could get no good photos. But I love the the sense of humor on some of the signage here and also at the Columbus Zoo, that which of course owns and runs The Wilds.
The best and only good pic I could get of a Prezewalski's Wild Horse.	The raccoon is, of course, not part of the animal collection at The Wilds, they are simply local residence who interlope, as is their want to do.	Scemitar Oryx.
More Scemitar Oryx.
One of the more unique, perhaps the most unique, animal at The Wilds is the Sichuan Takin. They kind of look like a goat with a caribou's head, or something some such as that, or maybe some sort of miniature Wildebeest.
Two more pics of the Sichuan Takins.		You want Zebra pics; I got Zebra pics.
I could have put way more pics of zebras here, they were quite cooperative in terms of "posing" or just basically being easily photogenic. What you see here was pretty much a random draw from the photos I was able to get during both Wildside tours and the departing open air bus tour.
Following are some photos to give an idea of the landscapes at The Wilds. These were all taken from the summit where the public buildings, and the yurts, are located.
A cool sky pic.	The storm that was rolling in just as I was about to leave The Wilds for Hocking Hills.	Some point during my stay as I was roughing it in my air conditioned yurt, equipped with electricity and available WiFi, though the latter was a pretty weak signal.

*Or hit your browser's back button to return to your original page or to go to the klstorer.com home page: