Travels with Serge and Jeanne: Ohio Safari!

The next morning we assembled ourselves for an overnight trip to The Wilds, a wildlife conservation center in southeastern Ohio, about an hour and a half from our place. The Wilds is one of the largest conservation centers in the world, nearly 10,000 acres, situated on land strip mined in the 1960s and 1970s and reclaimed in the early 1980s. (The world's largest dragline, called Big Muskie, removed twice the soil moved in building the Panama Canal to uncover the coal.)

That day Columbus was on the edge of a conveyor belt of storms streaming up the Ohio River valley. As we drove towards The Wilds, the ash-gray sky became darker, sprinkles transformed into a steady rain, and the wind picked up. Clearly we would postpone our Open Air Safari until tomorrow, fingers crossed.

On arrival we checked in at Nomad Ridge, the one-year-old group of yurts that provides a lodging choice for groups too small to stay in The Lodge.

During a great dinner at the Overlook Cafe -- we were the only diners, unsurprising on a rainy Sunday evening on the first weekend Nomad Ridge was open -- Joan and I learned the French term for raccoon. (The Overlook Cafe gets a regular visitor.) It is raton laveur, "washer rat," very apt. We then spent some time on the observation platform next to the yurts, even if it was too wet to light the fire pit.

There were white rhinoceroses swimming in one of the lakes, best seen through binoculars. We were in the "contented" zone and hung out until it got too dark to see much.

As Joan will tell you, it rained and blew all night. (I think she was getting discouraged.) As we were rising a tangerine stripe to the north and west began to pry away the gray sky, and by breakfast time Chef Todd had already set up an outdoor table.

Then it was time to begin the first part of our day, the Wildside tour.

From the back of the truck we had an unimpeded view, and the truck could go off the road, unlike the buses. Some of us got a touch of pink from the unaccustomed sun.

It was spring, of course, so there were lots of young'uns.

Keep your hands inside the truck, please.

The Wilds is engaged in many facets of wildlife conservation: preserving species that are critically endangered, or have even been extinct in the wild, such as Pere David's Deer, species reintroduction, land restoration and ecology, conservation education, and conservation research. The Wilds gives researchers a chance to observe the animals in natural conditions, allowing them to experiment with and fine-tune protocols and equipment, such as anesthetic doses and radio collars, before embarking on research on truly wild populations. They also rehabilitate animals that have been kept in unkind conditions, such as a rhinoceros that had lived on concrete for so long that he had to be coaxed to step out onto grass.

Here's a pair of Bactrian camels. There's a male Bactrian who must think he has gone to heaven; previously confined for many years, he now lives with grass, girls, large spaces to roam, and a healthy diet.

In the last few years the Wilds has expanded its efforts beyond herbivores with the 2007 opening of the Mid-Sized Carnivore Conservation Center. Here you will find African wild dogs, cheetahs, and dholes (Asian wild dogs). 

Serge captured a good closeup of one of the African dogs through the fence.

The African wild dogs are pack hunters, and very intelligent. They outmaneuver and devour any Canada geese that land in their compound, feinting and confusing the geese with multiple threats. Keepers and handlers rarely enter their compound, even in a large group, because the dogs will instinctively identify the weakest member and target them. At the Wilds there is an extended family of the dogs.

The dholes are much shyer than the African dogs. They strongly resemble foxes.

But for sheer lithe beauty and grace, you can't surpass a cheetah.

To keep the cheetahs alert and interested in their environment, they are not fed one day a week. At the Wilds, fasting day is Monday. Today was Monday. A side note: if a cheetah is following you and/or your kids along the fence, he's not being cute; he's sizing up the smallest member of your party. It's what they do.

Chris, our guide, had a special opportunity for us at the normally off-limits cheetah quarters. The cheetah caretakers were closely watching a female, who they thought was approaching estrus. The female cheetah is interested in mating for only 12 to 48 hours in a year, so breeding cheetahs in captivity requires diligence. Only some males are tolerated by the female at any time of year, winnowing the number of potential suitors. The males are introduced into a plot that the female has recently inhabited, to expose them to her scent and gauge their behavior. Then they are returned to their own spaces.

We stood along one side of a roadway between compounds when the keeper released the males from the plot they'd been visiting, and they loped past us back to their own housing. The cheetahs came within a yard or two of us as we stood very still. Here's a look down the roadway as the last of the cheetahs reaches the end and slows down. Another, on the right, has paused to converse with the female inside the fence.

The female and the male she appeared to get along with were introduced into the same area.

Two of the video clips I took turned out OK; the wind muffles some of the sound. They show the two cheetahs getting more familiar with each other, but the male clearly understands that it's just not time yet.




Before we left, Chris cut off some willow that was growing in a streambed near the cheetah quarters. This will come up later.

As we drove on, we passed many critters. Here are some zebra.

The advantage of traveling in the truck became apparent as Chris sought out the takins for us. Joan and I have admired takins ever since seeing them in Bhutan, where they are the national animal. (These takins are a different subspecies, Sichan takin, B. taxicolor tibetana.)  Chris drove offroad and cross-slope, on soggy ground from yesterday's rains, to arrive at a lakeshore woods where the females and the babies usually browsed. The takins have thrived at the Wilds, and their numbers have increased.

There were a couple of takin infants that were a mere two weeks old.

In one pasture various ungulates happily grazed together.

The male takins were taking it easy in a shelter house.

Then we hit rhinoceros country.

This giraffe knows that she looks elegant,doesn't she?

Now we learned why Chris had cut the willow branches.

We all got a chance to feed her. Hold on tight to the willow, though, or she'll pull it right out of your hand.

She'll also eat an apple slice from the palm of your hand. While she's distracted by eating it's OK to touch her face and feel the bristles.

The cab of the truck makes a good dining-room table.

This giraffe is the only one that has learned, or let her guard down enough, to accept Chris' treats. The others stand off and watch.

But now it's time to move on. More charismatic megafauna await, including this young rhino.

Another truck passed us by, a team looking for a day-old scimitar-horned oryx. They needed to give it an initial medical exam (largely drawing a little blood) and to tag it. Needless to say, the mother oryx was not pleased when her baby was discovered in the tall grass and abducted by the truck.

The exam went quickly.

And soon they were reunited.

Our next destination was back at the Visitor's Center. Usually our Open-Air Safari, as a group staying at Nomad Ridge, would have been the previous afternoon, but the skies were pouring then. Joan had verified before we left Reynoldsburg that we would be able to Safari after the Wildside tour if the weather was bad. While she tried, not for the first time nor the last, to check out of Nomad Ridge (they had a new computer system), I asked at the center about the Open-Air Safari. They radioed for a bus. The oil pressure on the first bus conked out as it reached the center, so we waited for another, which arrived after a few minutes.

I was concerned that riding in the Open-Air Safari after the Wildside tour would be anticlimactic, but the mood was cheerful and everyone had a good time, including the driver/guide.

One of our early stops was new to Serge and Jeanne, having been bypassed on our Wildside tour. (You can't see everything in just one morning!) There is a short gravel path that switchbacks down to a platform on one of the lakes, where you can feed the ravenous catfish and admire the trumpeter swans.

At the Mid-sized Carnivore Center, the African dogs were snoozing away the heat of the day.

The dholes, however, were more active than they had been. Their dark tails looked as if feather dusters had been glued to their rumps.

I won't inflate this post by repeating the zebra or many other pictures, but I do have a few more that I must show. This male takin had decided to chill in a small pond.

The camels nibble and scrape the shelter house poles until they resemble eroded pillars.

Here three rhinos are browsing amongst the autumn olive.

The autumn olive, Elaeagnus umbellata, or Japanese silverberry, is an invasive. While AEP (American Electric Power) did state-of-the-art restoration of the strip-mined area thirty years ago, the autumn olive is today a migraine headache for the Wilds, and they are experimenting to discover how to control or eliminate it without damaging the rest of the ecology. The autumn olive prevents erosion and fixes nitrogen in the soil, but it also crowds out native species. The ecological restoration work that goes on at the Wilds is not merely academic, but has practical applications in many situations, including their own.

Finally it was time for us to go home. Jeanne captured this image of the downtown church in Zanesville, Ohio.

Tired, dusty, and sometimes sunburned, we weren't eager to dress up to go out for dinner. Instead we stopped on our way, close to home, at the Wine Guy wine shop and bistro in Pickerington (now defunct). Serge and Jeanne found this fascinating. In their experience in France, a wine shop is a wine shop and a bistro is a bistro, and the two do not appear together! We had a good dinner and each indulged in a red wine flight, where you get a smaller quantity of four different wines, organized on a theme (Cabernet flight, Italian wines flight, and so forth). At the end of a long, sunny day, everybody was happy.