Detroit Zoo - Belle Isle Nature Zoo

Belle Isle Nature Zoo

The Belle Isle Nature Zoo encompasses approximately 6 acres (2.4 ha) of undisturbed forested wetland on Belle Isle in Detroit, Mich. The Nature Zoo provides year-round educational, recreational and environmental conservation opportunities for the community.

A Deer Encounter, where fallow deer that once roamed the island can be fed by visitors, is part of a multi-phase project to convert the former nature center on Belle Isle into a Nature Zoo focusing on Michigan wildlife, flora and fauna. The Nature Zoo also includes a renovated auditorium, a turtle exhibit featuring native Michigan turtles, an indoor beehive allowing year-round viewing of bee behavior, a spider exhibit and a Creation Station for children’s educational programming.

Future plans for the Nature Zoo include more nature trails, small mammal exhibits, aquatic life exhibits, a wetland pond and an amphitheater.

Read more about this topic:  Detroit Zoo

Famous quotes containing the words belle isle, belle, isle, nature and/or zoo:

    Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or
    some northerly harbor of Labrador,
    before he became a schoolteacher
    a great-uncle painted a big picture.
    Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)

    Adolescents have the right to be themselves. The fact that you were the belle of the ball, the captain of the lacrosse team, the president of your senior class, Phi Beta Kappa, or a political activist doesn’t mean that your teenager will be or should be the same....Likewise, the fact that you were a wallflower, uncoordinated, and a C student shouldn’t mean that you push your child to be everything you were not.
    Laurence Steinberg (20th century)

    It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands. Behind every man’s busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.
    Denis Diderot (1713–1784)

    ...there was the annual Fourth of July picketing at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. ...I thought it was ridiculous to have to go there in a skirt. But I did it anyway because it was something that might possibly have an effect. I remember walking around in my little white blouse and skirt and tourists standing there eating their ice cream cones and watching us like the zoo had opened.
    Martha Shelley, U.S. author and social activist. As quoted in Making History, part 3, by Eric Marcus (1992)