Visiting the Micke Grove Zoo in Lodi

When looking for things to do in Lodi, I stumbled upon the fantastic Micke Grove Regional Park, which contains an excellent museum, beautiful Japanese gardens, and of course, the Micke Grove Zoo. The zoo itself is pretty small, but it has a lot of fun exhibits for the whole family, here is all the info if you want to visit the zoo.

Details

• $5 to get into the regional park per car, $5 a person for zoo
• This information is from my visit in 2016

Getting There

The zoo is located in the back left corner of Micke Grove Regional Park. After entering the park, you will be given a map that shows you the zoo’s location, and from there you can park near the zoo and enter it.

The Zoo

After paying my $5, I headed into the zoo armed with a map of the different animals on display. It is small, so you don’t really need a map to find all of the animals.

This zoo doesn’t have any of those big-ticket animals like bears and such, but there were some pretty fun animals to see. Here is what I saw:

Spider Monkey

Porcupine

Turtle

Golden Lion Tamarin

Squirrel

Hissing Cockroach

Gecko

The zoo also has a fun aviary where you can walk into the actual exhibit with the birds. There were a half dozen different types of birds in this area, and even though it was small, it still offered a fun way to see animals without the cages between you and them.

My favorite thing I saw at the zoo was the Golden Lion Tamarin; they had such majestic faces on such small bodies, and when I was there, they were jumping all around and interacting with each other, which was fun to watch.

After about 30 minutes, I had seen the whole zoo and made my way out. Across from the zoo, you will see the Japanese Gardens, and I would recommend that you head over there and check them out as well as they are gorgeous.

This zoo is not something I would make an entire day out of, but it had enough to see that it easily warranted the $5 cost to me. Check it out if you are in the area and be sure to go to the San Joaquin Museum as well, which is fantastic and also located in the same regional park.