MIDLAND, Texas — It won’t be long until the land that was the Nueva Vista Golf Course will become the home of Zoo Midland, a new project that was announced in October.
"We keep progressing. We're moving much closer to groundbreaking, which will hopefully be relatively soon," Zoo Director Jason Green said.
Because you can’t build a zoo in a day.
"[We're] busy as a beehive behind the scenes that a lot of people don't get to see: finalizing details, getting construction design documents down," Green said. "We should be hopefully breaking ground relatively soon in the next few months, possibly. And we'll continue to work on that. And then once we get started, it will be a continuous build for the next three years."
Right now, the plan is to open the zoo in mid-2027.
In the meantime, the venue wants to build excitement for something that hasn't been in the Tall City for almost four decades.
And if you’ve stopped at a red light in the city the last few days, you might’ve noticed something wild: signal boxes wrapped in animal print.
"This one is sort of a fun way to launch a marketing campaign," Green said. "We get to beautify some of the signal boxes here in and around Midland, but also just to sort of bring some interest to what we're doing and kind of continuing to let people know that we're here and we're going to be a part of the community and this is kind of a fun, challenging way for people to get out and see parts of Midland and also see some of the unique animal patterns that we put on the signal boxes."
These 10 unique signal boxes are spread all around the city of Midland.
If interested in starting an adventure and finding out where they are, Zoo Midland has you covered on their social media.
"If you check back on our Facebook and Instagram, we'll be putting out some clues to the locations of some of these signal boxes," Green said.
And if you finish the safari and find all 10, there could be a prize in store.
"We're going to do a random drawing," Green said. "[...] there's some rules, you can find it on our Facebook or Instagram and those will give you some of the steps that you need to take."
It’s a way to take some steps around the city where this brand-new journey will take place.
All while waiting for the real zebras, the real jaguars and the real peacocks.