Wilstem Wildlife Park in Southern Indiana: Safari and Animal Encounters
Below is a transcript of our interviews with Carrie Berg, Director of Operations at Wilstem Wildlife Park:
We are an animal safari park. We are in between Paoli and French Lick, which is part of Orange County. Wilstem is proud to be located in southern Indiana. It's just a unique option for our state and for our region to be offering the conservation efforts that we are here and to be bringing guests in and educating them in our home state about how different we are versus other facilities that they have been to in the past.
We bring north of 100,000 visitors annually here to our facility. We have a lot of people coming into town to come see us. We have several experiences and tours that they can do here when they're visiting.
Drive-Thru Safari Experiences
Our drive-thru safari is very popular. There's two options for that. There's a self-guided where you drive through in your own vehicle, and then there's also a guided wagon safari tour option as well. Each is great, both very, very popular. The wagons are very popular with younger children. It's a little bit more interactive, led by one of our guides. They're explaining the animals that you're seeing as you're going through the safari. It's a little bit more informative in that manner. But the self-guided is also a great option.
In the safari we have a wide variety of the animals there. We've got birds, we've got ostriches and emus. If you've been here, you know the emus, because if you've done the safari you've definitely met them. They love the feed. We have camels that are also very, very popular. They love to be fed as well.
We've got llamas. We've got nilgai, which is an antelope breed. We've got eland, which is another antelope breed. We've got fallow deer and sika deer. We've got all kinds of different cattle breeds out there. We've got bison, a growing herd of bison that's been very popular. We've got elk. All kinds of things! Aoudad, which kind of look like goats. They've got curved horns. They're called Barbary sheep.
We're always looking to expand our options as far as our safari animals go to have fun out there and get some different species that you may not see at other facilities.
In the animal safari, a lot of times our guests will come in mentioning the emus or the camels, and we know their names, and we're able to tell them about their names and often times people will email us afterwards with pictures of animals from the safari and say, “who is this one?” and things like that. It's a lot more personal, a lot more intimate compared to a zoo or something like that where you're just going to see the animals from a distance.
Roos and Crew: Indoor Animal Encounters
The Roos and Crew building has all kinds of our smaller animals in it. You're going to see primates that consist of our cotton-top tamarins, our squirrel monkeys, our roughed lemur. We've got a binturong in there, which is also called a bear cat. We've got a couple sloths that are showstoppers. They're very, very popular with our encounter guests. We've got several different reptiles. We've got our kangaroos that guests love; they can actually meet in our mini kangaroo encounters. We've got tortoises and turtles. We actually just recently built a turtle enclosure that's been very popular with guests to be able to see those turtles.
We have armadillos that recently had a baby. We did a contest on Facebook for our guests to be able to name him. His name is Bowser. He's doing fantastic. We've got a couple giraffes in that location as well; Burt’s been here for years, and we have a new 16-month-old baby giraffe. His name is Daktari, and he recently joined us, so we're super excited to have him. He's doing great with guests and is becoming best friends with Burt very quickly. Those are the animals in the Roos and Crew building.
What Makes Wilstem Wildlife Park Different?
We always tell people that when they come to Wilstem, they come to actually meet our animals, not just see them. Our encounters are super interactive, hands on. They're up close and personal. Our animals have names, so when they leave, they know that they met Luna the sloth or Burt the giraffe. It's just a lot more interactive and personal in that manner, our animal encounters are.
All of our animal encounters are driven completely by educating the guests and talking with them about the specific species that they're seeing and that they're meeting. Our keepers are fantastic. They're all very well educated on those specific animals, and they do a great job of giving facts to the guests as they present their encounter to them.
The encounters are also very interactive, in that there's always a question portion where the guests can ask any questions that they might have about that specific animal. Our keepers are happy to answer those questions, and that's really how the encounters become interactive in that manner and basically focus completely on educating the guests while they're here.
All of our encounters are unique to our facilities. We've actually created those all ourselves. Like I said, they're very hands-on. Our goal is for guests to leave here with an experience that they remember for years to come, that they're laughing through, that they're talking about with their children and grandchildren and their neighbors and spreading the word about what we're doing here.
They are structured to be interactive, to be hands-on, and to be educational in the manner that they can take something away with them when they leave our park.
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The above video is a clip from Journey Indiana from WTIU. You can watch more segments and full episodes at pbs.org/show/journey-indiana/