SAN ANTONIO – The San Antonio Zoo welcomed tens of thousands of visitors during the opening weekend of the new Congo Falls exhibit from Friday to Sunday.
This is the first time gorillas have been seen at the SA Zoo in 35 years.
“We saw nearly 30,000 guests over the weekend, with multiple events at The Ralston, where guests looked over the Congo Falls festivities and enjoyed the drone shows on both Friday and Saturday evenings,” said Hope Roth, vice president of Marketing, Public Relations, Internal/External Communications & Community Affairs. “One event at The Ralston even had a surprise visit from a gorilla at the top of Mays Family Silverback Peak on Saturday.”
While Roth said numbers on Sunday were not as high as the other days due to the weather, it was an overall “great weekend at the zoo.”
KSAT also reached out to the zoo to ask about certain behaviors the gorillas were exhibiting that had been concerning some viewers, such as banging on the enclosure glass.
When asked why they were acting like this, Roth said, “What you’re seeing is a gorilla expressing big gorilla feelings! This is a natural behavior that the bachelor troop has always exhibited, even at their previous home. Banging on objects to make loud noises is one way gorillas communicate with one another or to get a reaction from visitors.”
KSAT visited the gorillas on Saturday morning, where confetti cannons and pyrotechnics welcomed them back to the San Antonio Zoo. Hundreds of families eagerly waited in line to see Congo Falls.
“The City has been waiting thirty-five years for the return of the gorillas, and we’re so excited to see thousands of thousands of people are here,” said CEO and President of the San Antonio Zoo Tim Morrow.
The two-acre habitat is filled with greens and a 70-foot-tall Gorilla Viewing Tower for guests to watch the seven gorillas inside.
“We’ve been waiting for more than a year for this to open. We’ve started a countdown at home,” said one family who showed up to the grand opening in custom-made gorilla shirts.
The new effort from the zoo drew recognition from county, city, and state officials while promising to continue to support conservation efforts around the globe.
“Hopefully, we have babies in the next couple of years and continue to grow this group, because we built a big habitat with that future in mind of having big families,” Morrow said.
“We’re already talking about what’s next for San Antonio Zoo,” Morrow continued. “We have the entire other side of 281 on the zoo ground still to build out. So we have been saying we want to bring elephants back in a big way, so that’ll be in our future. But we have some really great designs coming.”
“Somebody asked us yesterday, ‘How are you going to top Congo Falls? We just said just wait,” he said.
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