The Zoo in the Cold Months: Roger Williams Park Zoo's Animals Prefer November
Red pandas in their element, snow leopards at home, and giraffes watching the leaves fall. Why the zoo's keepers call late fall the animals' favorite season — and a fine one for visitors too.
Every zoo has two seasons, and the animals vote for the second one. At Roger Williams Park Zoo — 40 acres inside the park, founded in 1872 and now a nationally accredited institution known for its conservation breeding — the November cool wakes the place up: the red pandas and snow leopards come into their weather, the bison and elk wear their winter coats coming in, and the giraffes make their stately rounds of a yard emptied of summer's crowds.
The zoo's modern shape is a series of habitats built over decades: the Fabric of Africa, the Marco Polo's Adventure Trek, Australasia, the rainforest building that steams pleasantly against November's chill, and a children's farmyard that anchors a million local childhoods. Behind the exhibits runs the real institution — breeding programs for endangered species (the zoo's work with everything from red pandas to American burying beetles is the unglamorous core), a veterinary hospital, and keeper staffs who know their charges by temperament and name.
Its autumn marquee, the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular, lights the zoo's trail with thousands of carved pumpkins through the Halloween season and draws the region's biggest fall crowds — by the first week of November the last pumpkins are compost and the zoo returns to the animals and the school groups, which is its natural state.
Go this month: arrive at opening, catch the cold-weather species at their friskiest, and take the rainforest's warmth as your halfway reward. The summer zoo belongs to the crowds. The November zoo belongs to Providence — and, by all evidence, to the snow leopards.
