Ohio's Wilds a safari on 10,000 acres

CUMBERLAND, Ohio -- It's a jungle out there.

And the Wilds is really out there.

One of the largest wildlife conservation centers in the world, the Wilds is located on nearly 10,000 acres of former coal-mining land, about 85 miles southeast of Columbus. Antelope, bison, camels, giraffes, white rhinos, zebras and more live here in a natural, open-range habitat.

Who knew?

The Wilds is open to the public Saturdays and Sundays through October. After that, there are 14 "Winter on the Wilds" events, such as "Calling in the Owls" at 6:30 p.m. Nov. 8, where staff teach visitors owl calls to beckon the nocturnal birds, and "Wild Cats" at 10 a.m. Dec. 6, when visitors can learn about the differences between bobcats and cheetahs. What about the cougars from Gibson's steak house?

During the regular season, guests tour the grounds in a bus or open-aired, safari-style vehicle, depending on the weather. The "Safari Transport" buses run on biodiesel fuel.

During "Winter on the Wilds" months, guests are escorted in education buses (school buses painted with murals). In the fall and winter, some weather-sensitive animals, such as giraffes, get moved to heated barns.

"People are always the ones captured here, or enclosed," spokesperson Toni Kellar said during a tour.

Animals share the grounds with 150 lakes and a two-mile wetland trail. Mountain bike trails north of the visitor center are free and open to the public year-round.

The primary mission of the Wilds is to support successful breeding. There are more than 25 species of non-native wildlife from Africa, Asia and North America, as well as hundreds of indigenous species. Most of the species are classified as endangered. The Wilds keeps fences and cages to a minimum. Otherwise, I wondered what made the Wilds different than a zoo?

"The biggest challenge we have is to come up with that 30-second elevator speech," said Wilds Executive Director Evan Blumer. "We're really here as a high-end scientific facility. The differences with us and a traditional zoo are in scale, scope and focus. In scale, we are nearly 200 times the size of the average zoo in North America. Because we're doing that on a larger landscape we have to manage animals differently, deal with visitors differently, even communicating between two buildings is done differently. Our campus is the size of some counties."

The Wilds works closely with Columbus Zoo of Jack Hanna fame. The cheetahs at the Wilds' mid-sized carnivore center came from the Columbus Zoo.

"Animals are moved based on breeding needs," Kellar explained. "Last week, one of our male rhinos went to Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Texas and one of their male rhinos came here."

It's like a honeymoon ranch.

"It is," she said. "They're very happy when they're here."

The animals roam around land once mined for coal from the '40s to the '80s. The Central Ohio Coal Company in 1984 gave the property to the International Center for the Preservation of Wild Animals, and the Wilds opened to the public a decade later.

You won't find large trees in the Wilds because the soil was compacted by mining, and the new topsoil isn't suited for rooted trees. The sprawling area has been reseeded as native Ohio prairie land that attracts rare meadowlark, swamp sparrows and raptors. The Audubon Society has designated it an "Important Bird Area."

There's a superb gift shop and a small cafe where I put on my locavore hat and enjoyed some crispy Conn's potato chips from nearby Zanesville.

The mid-sized carnivore center opened this year. It's dedicated to carnivores that are not as large as lions and tigers. The center works with cheetahs, African wild dogs and dholes (pronounced dole, the Central Asian red dogs popularized in The Jungle Book). The San Diego Wild Animal Park is the only other facility in the U.S. with dholes.

Visitors can watch behind-the-scenes procedures through the center's large windows.

"We're here as a working conservation science center," Blumer said. "But we can turn that work into something we show people.

"This is not going to replace habitat for anybody," he added. "The only place we're going to conserve these species is in their natural habitats. But there's an awful lot we need to learn about that. We are the zoo for rural, southeastern Ohio, which is one-third our market. But the other two-thirds and the future growth of the Wilds is a much more cosmopolitan community of people who know more and want to do more."