Wilde Times at Wildwood Zoo: May Edition

Friday, May 22nd, 2026 -- 1:00 PM

It’s time for the May edition of Wild Times at Wildwood Zoo.

I spoke with Kyle Kirk, Wildwood Zoo Manager, and he discussed what’s been happening at the zoo and what’s coming up down the road.

Listen to the interview with Kyle here!

(AI assisted transcription via Otter.ai)

Kyle: "Within the past month, we had a flash flooding event, but we sustained no damage, I'm happy to announce. That was pretty crazy. Higher ups said that they had never seen so much water in the zoo, but it was really crazy. I came the day after, and it all had flowed through. All the dams were open for, you know, for weeks preceding that, so all the water just took off right away, and we sustained no damage. That was good."

"And besides that, we unfortunately lost our old female mountain lion Star. She was going to be 18 in June. Mountain lions, you know, they just really...they don't get that old in the wild. And an 18-year-old mountain lion is really old in the wild. That's a lot of fawns and a lot of, a lot of preying on other animals to get their protein and everything. So, it's pretty remarkable that we got her to that old of age. She went very peacefully."

"And besides that, we've launched our app, our Envirothon app. It's basically just something that people are allowed to come to the zoo, and, if they're on the app, they can say they've observed certain species in the zoo and any species, really wild or otherwise."

"So, it's really nice. Like, I know somebody just posted that they've seen our first wild pair of fawns in the zoo, so it's a great way for the community to connect, and we can all kind of see what everybody else is seeing when they come to the park. So, that's really cool."

"And additionally to that, we had a really big vet rounds. We knocked down all of our bison on all of our elk. We did hoof trims on the bison, and everybody stood up after, and it didn't go lame, and it's doing really well."

"And yearly, we do a parasitic flush on the elk. In years past, they had lost some of the elk females to liver flukes in the ponds, so we like to start each year for them with a parasite flush, so we send the tube down into their stomach and we send some antibiotic solution down there just to make sure that they're running right, and every everybody got up and did really well."

Riley: "What's coming up?"

Kyle: "We're going to our summer hours on Memorial Day, that's when we'll be closing the zoo up at 7:45pm. You know, every night our zoo is open every day during the week, 7am to 7:30am at night and we're kicking off our Wild Wednesdays."

"That'll be the first week of June that we'll have speakers come down to Wildwood Station in the park, and they will discuss, you know, different subjects about animals and about nature, and that'll be going on every Wednesday. We can definitely find more information about that on our Facebook page and on the city website for Marshfield. We get a great turnout for that, and it's really great stuff to learn."

Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.