One Small Zoo

Before I go anywhere, I consult a map. Even though I know the route to St. Louis and back cold, and I even remember the streets of St. Louis well enough to get from downtown to Washington University, I looked at a few maps before I went. I was rewarded with the discovery of the Henson Robinson Zoo.

Springfield, Illinois, is well known for its many Lincoln sites, including his house and grave and now a spanking-new interactive edutainment museum. Lincoln’s name is on every other brick in Springfield, it seems. But I needed something to break up the trip with a toddler, and Lincoln wasn’t the thing. On the map I saw a red point-of-interest dot, the zoo, not too far off I-55, and decided that if we were going to stop in Springfield, it would be there.

The Henson Robinson Zoo, a unit of the Springfield Park District, isn’t large. It isn’t famous. In the zoo world, it must be the equivalent of a community college. But I didn’t want an all-day zoo experience; I needed something worth about two hours’ of my time; and I found it. Since it was small, it wasn’t tiring, and it had a lot of shade, so I was able to keep Ann from getting too much sun. It was a Thursday afternoon, so it wasn’t crowded. Admission: $3.25 for me, nothing for Ann. That’s about right. Megazoos, the San Diego Zoo and their ilk, tend to gouge their visitors. Hey! This is the world-famous San Diego Zoo, as seen on TV! Cough it up.

Ann actually paid some attention to the animals. I wasn’t sure she would, but she did. A small zoo has small animals, mostly, and we saw spider monkeys, wallabies, lemurs, foxes, various birds, assorted cats, a couple of small bears, prairie dogs, otters, alligators and some other creatures -- nothing too big, no elephants or herds of zebra or fat sea lions in huge tanks. Their absence didn’t bother me or Ann.

There were at least a dozen peacocks wandering around the zoo grounds, not confined anywhere, sometimes with plumage fully open, sometimes not. I even saw one way up in a tree, and heard several being noisy. Ann had her most fun feeding ducks and geese in one of the ponds. Palmfuls of pellets were available from a machine for a quarter, and I spent two quarters that way.