Feeding a giraffe by hand south of Battle Creek

A giraffe’s tongue is about eighteen inches long, dark purple, and shockingly precise, and at Binder Park Zoo you can hold out a leaf of romaine lettuce and feel one curl around it like a finger. The feeding happens at the Twiga Overlook, a raised boardwalk that brings you up to head height with the herd — one of the larger giraffe groups at any zoo in the country. It’s the headline act of Wild Africa, an eighteen-acre stretch of mock savanna where the animals roam more or less cage-free and you walk a winding trail through them rather than past them.

The whole zoo sits on 433 wooded, hilly acres south of Battle Creek, which is a lot of room for a place that opened in 1977. That space is the point. Instead of the old menagerie row of small enclosures, Binder Park spreads out: you ride a tram or hoof it down a long boardwalk to reach Wild Africa, passing through forest and wetland so that the savanna feels genuinely arrived-at. The African section is dressed as a little village, gift shop and all, named after the Swahili word for the trade goods — zawadi — that once moved along these routes.

There are red pandas and Mexican gray wolves and a children’s farm too, but the giraffes are what people drive in for. Bring small kids and budget extra time, because once a child has fed a giraffe by hand they will want to do it again, and again, until the lettuce runs out. It’s a strange and quiet thrill — a wild animal three stories of neck above you, choosing, gently, to take a leaf from your open palm.