Mesker Park Zoo

We have had a zoo membership since 2022 and it has been a lot of fun!

It's open year round and we enjoy going year round.  Some of our most fun trips have been in winter when we bundle up and stroll the zoo.

If you ever find yourself in Evansville, we love our little zoo.

The zoo is small-ish and hilly.

It's rarely crowded and about 20 minutes from our house.

We love the penguins, the playground, the turtles in the lake, the carousel, the otters, the red pandas, feeding the birds, the flower garden and going through Amazonia.

No zoo is perfect.  We wish we had cool animals like polar bears or pandas.  Or big cats, elephants or really exciting attractions, but we can always go visit a big zoo when we're in a big city.

Just avoid Boo at the Zoo.  You pay to trick or treat and you barely get to see any animals.  Live and learn!

Amazonia is the coolest buildling.  Very jungle like and lots of neat things to see.

Olive introduced us to axolotls and she's always excited to see them.

We splurged and paid to feed the penguins this trip.  It was fun, but really fast.  It's $5/person and you get one fish.  You drop it in the penguins mouth and you're done.  I'm glad the kids got to do it, but we probably wouldn't do it again.  They really love watching the penguins swim and dive.

You pay tokens for everything in the zoo so stock up at the token stations if you want to feed giraffes, ride the carousel, feed penguins or birds.  Don't make the mistake of waiting in line with cash because they won't accep it and your kids will be bummed.  Ask me how I know!?

Feeding the budgie birds was so cool.  It's $2/person and it was awesome.  We did it for the first time and we would definitely do this again.  The birds are hungry and friendly.  Everyone loved this activity.  Your $2 stick with birdseed on it actually lasts a long time.  And anything that brings your big kids this much joy is priceless.

We are still cracking up over Leo feeding the birds.

He grabbed his stick, held it up and yelled I WANT A BLUE ONE.  He thought you could just call our your bird order and a bird of your choosing would land on your stick.  It was HILARIOUS.  The birds did come see him once he stood still and quieted down.

It really was super cool to feed these budgie birds.

We can see lots and really enjoy ourselves in about 90 minutes.  We like to go first thing in the morning.  Of course you can stroll, pack a lunch and stay longer, but we go regularly and 90-2 hours is perfect for us.  I do still bring a stroller for Leo because the hills are so big.  He walks a lot of the time.  It's just nice to have a stroller for him to hop in when he needs a break from all that walking.  Spring is busy with field trips during the day, but the rest of the year the crowds are low.

Let me know if you have any zoo questions!