Action Wildlife a 116-acre safari park located in Goshen, Connecticut, which I visited on September 18, 2016. Overall I found the park to be just okay, not something I’d rush back to, especially with the admission being around $25 per person and not the $10 advertised on their website. There isn’t really much to say about this place. Basically the set-up is you drive your own car along a series of dirt roads that lead to various fenced-in fields with mainly hoofstock in them. One can walk most of the roads if they so choose as well. The enclosures are all quite large and fairly uniform in being a patch of grass with a fence around it. As far as the collection goes, it’s unfortunately mostly domestics despite what the website claims, with species such as ibex, Barbary Sheep, hog deer, “Persian Red Sheep”, and rhea being completely absent. Non-domestic taxa was limited to American Bison, Bison bison, a single horn-less Scimitar-Horned Oryx, Oryx dammah, a single Grant’s Zebra, Equus quagga boehmi, European Wild Boar, Sus scrofa scrofa, European Fallow Deer, Dama dama, unlisted subspecies of Red Deer, Cervus elaphus, and Elk, Cervus canadensis, and Emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae. There’s also a “drive-through safari” section, but this is actually just a 50-acre fenced-in forest area one still drives around the outside of, home to White-Tailed Deer, Odocoileus virginianus, and Japanese Sika Deer, Cervus nippon nippon. Additionally, the park also features a small museum and education center. This building features a very spacious enclosure for Common Boa, Boa constrictor, and Red-Footed Tortoise, Chelonoidis carbonaria, as well as a collection of taxidermied animals (mostly mammals but some birds) from North America, Eurasia, and Africa. The museum was actually quite nice for its small size and had a decent collection of animals, some of whom I suspect were past residents of the zoo. Species such as Snow Leopard, Brown Bear, Black-Backed Jackal, Fisher, Southern White Rhinoceros, and Chamois were all featured here. Overall this is a decent small zoo, but not one I’d go out of my way for. The enclosures are all nicely done but the collection is lacking and I felt it leaves a lot to be desired. The website is also very deceiving in terms of pricing, animal collection, and what it thinks “drive-through safari” means and I was left pretty disappointed after my visit. ~Thylo
