Our trip to the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch - San Antonio, TX

Hey all,
       I back again, ready to post some new content. This time I am going to talk about our trip to the "Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch - San Antonio, Texas". I know that my blog is starting to sound more and more like a travel blog. But Hey! I can only write about things which awed me right?... So here goes -" Our trip to the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch - San Antonio, TX".

First of, this post would a short one, because I am going to let my pictures speak and not so much my words. Also for this experience, it is more like "seeing is believing". The interesting thing about this trip is that this wildlife ranch was NOT a part of our plan. Then how we ended up there you ask? Well.. you see, in the year 2013, we used to live in Houston, TX from where we went on a road trip to the SeaWorld in San Antonio for our son's birthday. We also visited the city of San Antonio famous for something called the "Riverwalk" and few more things. On the way back we saw that there was a place called "Natural Bridge Caverns" - a system of naturally formed limestone caverns. I will blog about all these places in my future posts. But anyways, as we entered into the Natural Bridge state park, we saw two entryways - one leading to the caverns and another to the wildlife ranch. We went to the caverns after which, out of curiosity we went to the wildlife ranch too (though we have never heard of it!!). And this was one of the best experiences for us and our dear son.

     For people who have gone to African safaris (yes... its you dear sums) this experience may not be that awesome. But we have never been to any safaris and it was the coolest experience for us!! This place is a real wild animals petting farm. They do not have lions, tigers or other ferocious beasts here. But there are zebras, ostriches, wild buffaloes, bison, giraffe, rhinoceros etc. So here is what happens, once we enter the ranch, we pay the entry fee and get some packets with food pellets to feed the animals. Since this is a drive through ranch, we don't park anywhere till the end where we exit the wildlife area to a petting barnyard, restaurant and souvenir shops. So we start following the road through the park. The rangers will inform us about the ranch rules even at the start: no honking, no yelling or loud noises that would scare the animals away or make them go wild.

Then as you drive by slowly as a snail, the animals start coming to you one by one and know what to expect from you, with all the feeding that goes one everyday. They stick their noses into the open window of your car or take food pellets from your outstretched hands.

This is a picture taken of the cars trailing ahead of us. 

We had gazelles, deer, wild goats, ostrich, and many more come, take food from our hands. That's our DS with a deer and a zebra feeding out of his hand.

Also here are some of the animals that we saw up close.

 

 It was so cool when the ostrich in the above picture walked ahead of us till we drove out of the wildlife park and then walked back into the park in the same sedate pace.

The rhinoceros, giraffe and some other animals are kept in large enclosures. For ensuring safety of the visitors and the resident animals, there are always park rangers driving around inside the ranch. Also at the end of our drive through, there was a petting barnyard with goats and llamas to pet & feed. The kid goats were so after the food pellets and very mischievous that we felt like we were among a bunch of preschoolers!!! There are some monkeys and some birds too in enclosures.

Now coming to the ranch's location the Natural Bridge wildlife ranch is located between San Antonio and New Braunfels, Texas at:
26515 Natural Bridge Caverns Rd.
San Antonio, Texas 78266.
For more details and information check out their website:
www.wildliferanchtexas.com. 

Don't forget to checkout more cool pictures of the animals and photos posted by visitors for the safari photo contest in the website. Also all the pictures posted by the visitors in the website's photo contest are real, taken by people like you and me, not by professionals for advertisement purposes.
Also when you Google for this ranch, you will get to see more photos of the animals. This is one trip where you have to see more pictures, than hear or read more words to know about the place.
Hope I expressed myself well, to give you an idea about the Natural Bridge wildlife ranch and thanks for reading my post.
See you later in an another post, about another place...