These animal encounters are not available to the public at Wild Florida
Located on the shores of Lake Cypress in Kenansville, Wild Florida is easily one of the best attractions state-wide in my opinion. They offer plenty of animal encounters to the public like the popular 'Slothie' Experience encounter where visitors get to interact with and hold a sloth so you can get a selfie with it...it's appropriately named!
They also have great food at the Chomp House Grill, don't leave without tasting some gator tail...so good! Airboat tours run daily along with several scheduled animal shows. I believe what impressed me the most about this place was how well done the enclosures were here. Much nicer for the animals than most other similar operations.
We ended up shooting several segments for TV with the good folks here and I'd like to share some of the highlights with you. Our first stop was an encounter with a large alligator snapping turtle.
This big guy tried to get my GoPro when I stuck it in his pool while he was cooling off. Thankfully I reacted quick enough to pull it away, they have enormous power when they snap those jaws shut...could've been buh-bye GoPro.
Our next stop was to get in the enclosure with some porcupines to feed them peanuts and talk a bit about them.
Time for his close-up!
We also had a chance to get some face time with what were probably the cutest animals in the whole park.
That's a bobcat cub we got to bottle feed and a baby sloth we weighed to check on his growth progress. When we were shooting the segments with the baby animals it was mayhem. So many people crowding around to see what was going on and tons of noise. Understandable, but a pain in the butt when you're trying to get clean audio!
Now onto the best part...hand-feeding the alligators!
Meet Bonecrusher, the bad boy alligator of the pond. You can see all the people up on the pier watching the show. We had a mob following us all day it seemed like.
Here you can see our show host tossing a treat to Bonecrusher. We were surrounded by BIG gators on that small little piece of shore.
I also needed to get some REALLY CLOSE UP shots of the gators so I broke out the GoPro.
Ever wondered what it would be like to stick your head in a gator's mouth? Here's a short clip of these large lizards up close and personal!
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In case you missed the last post in this series you can see it here:
Adventures in Florida #13: Gopher Tortoises at Boyd Hill Nature Preserve
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