Friday, April 2, 2010

A Lovely Neighborhood Spot, If You Happen to be in Southeast Mass: Capron Park Zoo, Attleboro, MA




















Mind you, I only knew that Attleboro existed because I road through on the way home from a PawSox  game.  Thanks to our guestblogger Kim Foley MacKinnon for her new book Boston Baby: A Field Guide for Urban Parents because I would have never known about this little gem of a zoo, tucked in between Rhodie and the South shore.


What was most amazing about this zoo was not the funtastic playground outside the fence (although the boys were none too pleased to leave that behind).  No, it was the incredible diversity of endangered and rare animals in a zoo no bigger than our street.  They had snow leopards!  That's right, the same animal that Raghunandan Singh Chundawat followed for over five years in the Himalayas for National Geographic (great article here).  We caught the opening of their exhibit at the National Zoo in DC and it was a huge deal.  Of course the boys also really liked the sloth bear  (although he was pretty unslothlike in his pacing).

The highlight though?  The llamas.  Mean, hornery, grumpy and prone to spitting and biting, you would think that they wouldn't even make the top ten.  But, we got to feed them.  There is really nothing better than a wet lick from an animal four times your size when you are two.  Lij burned through at least three dollars of quarters (at $.25 for five pieces of feed).  It wasn't simply because we love Anna Dewdney's book Llama, Llama, Mad at Mama, this was just plain, old-fashioned zoo keeper fun.  So next time you head down for the PawSox, stop on the way home at Capron Park for some rare treats.


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