The Disneyland of the Outdoors

 

Last November I did something I’ve been waiting a decade to do…again.  I’ve done it once more since that time.  On both occasions I took my five-year-old granddaughter, Pfiefer with me.  She wasn’t even thought of the last time it was open. I took Patrick, my college sophomore son more recently.  The last time he saw it, he was in grade school.

I’m talking about the Bass Pro Shops Wonders of Wildlife in Springfield, Missouri.

It has been described as a Disneyland of sorts, but it reminds me more of heaven.

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Every outdoorsman and woman I know loves to visit Bass Pro Shop’s stores.  Besides the rows upon rows of the supplies we all “need” there are so many sights to engage the mind.  Mounts of animals, birds, and fish from around the world line the walls and stand atop the shelves.  Many stores have museums of conservation, hunting, fishing, and shooting.  Some have knife shops and actual, indoor shooting ranges.  Camping and hiking supplies are almost limitless.

To top it all, at the Springfield store, now there’s the Wonders of Wildlife museum.

The acronym of the attraction is imminently appropriate.  Wonders of Wildlife=WoW.

Wow indeed.

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Although advertisements describe the museum in easy statements, it defies neat classification for me.  Displays of wildlife, impeccably mounted by the best taxidermists in the world make up a large portion of the place.  Most of them are housed in lifelike dioramas of their natural habitats, like the huge rattlesnake that crawls across an Arizona desert and the massive tusked elephants who stand at alert in their African grassland home.  Many displays have no glass separating them, and only inches away, from viewers.

Sheep Mountain is one display where you roam mountain crags with more than 40 record-setting sheep of different species.  In another display the famous Chadwick Ram, considered by many to be the finest North American game specimen ever collected, shows off his 51 inch horns.  That’s more than four feet of horn, folks!

Not all the animals are lifeless, stuffed specimens.  One of the fliers released says, “At the heart of the Wonders of Wildlife experience is a world-class aquarium adventure, home to massive aquatic habitats teeming with life. There has never been an aquarium as immersive, interactive, or engaging as this. Guests of all ages can immerse themselves inside a river full of piranhas, discover what it’s like to touch a stingray, traverse an underwater tunnel surrounded by giant river monsters and come face-to-face with sharks, jellyfish, snakes, iguanas, eagles, owls and more. Throughout the journey, visitors will encounter more than 35,000 live fish, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds, representing more than 800 different species.”

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“Look Pa, a unicorn fish!” Pfiefer yelled, and she was right!  I think most Americans have never heard of, let alone seen, the almost mythical narwhal, a species of whale, the males of which usually grow one, long (about eight feet) tusk through the upper jaw and out the front of its head.  Yes, it really reminds the viewer of a unicorn, and a fish.

Another time, five-year-old Pfiefer grabbed Patrick’s hand, exclaiming, “Here’s the deers!”  She dragged her uncle as she darted into the huge room that contains dozens of full body mounts of some of the biggest trophy whitetail deer ever taken.  We’re talking several present and former world record and near world record bucks.  Others are unusual or odd specimens, like a cactus buck and a piebald deer.  Neck and shoulder mounts adorn the walls too, totaling several dozen.  Several.

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There are multiple big screens about eight feet tall and at least twice as long that constantly show informative videos on nature, wildlife, and conservation.  Convenient benches await the interested watcher to take a break from the long hike.  Of course, the first time he saw one of the screens, my sports nut son, said, “I wonder if they’ll put the Superbowl on one of those for us?”

On the same page there, buddy.

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I haven’t even mentioned all the beautiful works of art on display.  Beautiful oil paintings and bronze statues thrill the eye.  Other exhibits contain Native American artifacts and other historic items.  At least two displays contain mockups of extinct animals that disappeared before recorded history.

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When you round one corner in the museum you come face-to-face with an aquarium that is, to my best estimate, at least three stories tall.  Another huge one contains a replica of the conning tower of a real sunken ship and is where actor Mark Wahlberg went scuba diving during the grand opening.  And there are dozens of individual aquariums.  There are many fish that are larger than even the biggest human making his way along the labyrinthine path.

Path?  We’re talking about 1 ½ MILES of trail that winds through the museum.  And it’s all indoors!  The last time I was there with Patrick and Pfiefer, we had a very restricted time frame and still took more than two hours to make our way through…yet none of us was unsatisfied.

Not all the displays are even complete yet but I doubt anyone has left Wonders of Wildlife unsatisfied.

When you find a museum that is immersive and interactive enough to satisfy a five-year-old, paced so that a college man can enjoy it, and accurate enough not to insult an intelligent old-timer, you’ve got a winner.

I repeated the aforementioned acronym several times as we toured, and I bet you will too.

“Wow.”

Yeah, wow!

 

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(above) On opening night, the speaker is standing in front of one of the many big aquarium displays.  Way up above his head hang two fullsize taxidermied whales.

 

(below) A small (if two full-grown elephants can be called small) part of one of the dioramas.