Aerial view of a lush, green urban park surrounded by trees, buildings, and streets at sunset, with sunlight casting soft shadows across the landscape.

WILD ENCOUNTERS

Where everyone cares like a keeper

ABOUT THE EXHIBIT

Wild Encounters reimagines the former Family Farm with even more opportunities to meet animal keepers and interact with wildlife. Get up close to extraordinary animals and learn how each of us can practice care and empathy for wildlife every day.

Help Us Build a Better Zoo

With your gift to Wild Encounters, you can help us give the goats and ambassador animals an upgraded home and create new interactive experiences so everyone can care like a keeper—because empathy is a powerful conservation tool!

Give Today

Phase 1 Opens Summer 2026

Lorikeet Landing

Paid experience

Step inside an all-season aviary and interact with a rainbow of brilliant birds –lories and lorikeets. You can even practice caring like a keeper with a special feeding experience. Nectar cups for these small pollinators are provided with your Lorikeet Landing ticket.

Animal Encounters

Free experience

Get up close to animals in an expanded area where our popular goats may stop by to say “hi” or ask for a groom. The new arrival of Aldabra tortoises at the zoo will have you marveling at these giants that can live over 100 years. See this area get an even bigger upgrade in phase 2 in 2027.

Phase 2 Opens Summer 2027

Meet the Ambassador Animals

Wild Encounters will expand in 2027 with flexible habitats where you can meet our ambassador animals and learn from keepers what it takes to provide for their nutrition, health, training and wellbeing every day. New programming will create more opportunities than ever for guests to connect with what makes each of these animals so special and unique.

A close-up of a white goat with black markings, looking at the camera while holding a yellow autumn leaf in its mouth. The background is blurred.

Goat

A colorful lorikeet with vibrant green, red, yellow, and blue feathers perches on a tree branch, looking directly at the camera against a plain white background.

Lorikeet

A close-up view of a large tortoise walking on wood chips, with rocks and greenery in the background.

Aldabra Tortoise

ABOUT EMPATHY

Fostering Empathy for Conservation

Feeling empathy can help us turn our care and concern for animals into conservation action.

Woodland Park Zoo is leading the movement to transform zoos and aquariums into places where research-based empathy practices shape how people connect with animals and with their communities. Visiting a zoo is not just about seeing animals, it’s about cultivating care, understanding and a shared responsibility for our natural world. 

Woodland Park Zoo founded the Advancing Conservation through Empathy for Wildlife ® Network to bring together what is today a global community of over 1,000 educators, keepers, communicators and leaders sharing empathy research, learnings and resources for greater collective impact.

Learn more about empathy leadership at Woodland Park Zoo