In February of 2019, I took a 3 week trip to Houston. While there, I visited a few places such as the Houston Zoo and others. One of the places visited included the Bayou Wildlife Zoo in Alvin, TX. I have to preface this by stating that not only was it actively raining when I was visiting, but it had been raining for pretty much 2 weeks by this point. Due to that, everything was muddy – from trails to animals. Not an ideal photographic venture…
Some animals didn’t seem to really mind – like this white swan. Complete with water dripping off the beak.
What I wasn’t expecting really was that this was a vehicle tour site – in which I got to sit in an open safari type of wagon and was driven all over the park to see all the wide variety of animals they had. All patrons also got a bucket of feed and the animals were encouraged to come interact with the guests.
This Bactrian camel enjoys a light snack while his picture gets taken by the person holding the bucket. Considering the rain, the nom-turnout wasn’t as high as one might otherwise expect.
This small herd of Indian Black Buck Antelope does, for example, were quite comfortable right where they were – thank you very much.
The Brown Chinese Geese made their way to us but were a bit more discerning. This one looks over the offerings with a critical eye before making her decision.
While this is a private zoo (for now at least), it works with various conservation agencies to preserve species such as this Père David’s deer
A good look at Ostrich feet and I can totally see them being the descendants of Dinosaurs!
The fellow giving the tour had a wonderful accent, and I’ve never heard Bayou pronounced this way — Baah-ooo. It was rather cool, but I must confess that I have a very hard time pronouncing it without the Y sound in the middle of it. Anyway, that was a neat thing I learned!
The second Bactrian camel they had was white, and she was more interested in exploring the canopy over the wagons we were sitting in than in the food offered to her. I imagine at the end of the day (I literally managed to catch the last trip of the day), she’d had her real fill of the treats.
These buzzards sitting on the enclosure for the Alligator exhibit just cracked me up. Clearly the alligator is nicely well-fed enough that it doesn’t eat everything offered to it. A fact the vultures are well aware of and like to take advantage of.
This Barasingha doe was curious about the food, but too comfortable in the nest with the rest of the girls to actually get up and come over.
Overall, the Zoo had a wide variety of hoofed and feathered animals including Rhino. No predators, which enabled the zoo to be a fairly open range sort of place in which most of the animals had the ability to wander around the entire multi-acre park. There was a cute petting zoo at the main parking area where patrons could pet and/or feed the various domestic goats and pigs while waiting for the tour wagon to return. The giraffe space is right next to this, and one of the 3 giraffes was sitting comfortably out of the rain. The featured image for this post is the sitting Reticulated Giraffe.
See ALL the pictures from this trip which are available on the Bayou Wildlife Zoo page at DWPhotography.
Until next time, Adventure On!