When you tire of the concrete jungle and want to see the real thing, head to the verdant, 265-acre Bronx Zoo, the sprawling home to over 4,000 animals, from sinewy snow leopards and doe-eyed deer to charging rhinos and slithery reptiles. The zoo’s crowd-pleaser is the Congo Gorilla Forest, a dewy rainforest environment featuring one of the largest breeding groups of lowland gorillas. In keeping with the zoo’s philosophy, the exhibit is as much about enjoyment as it is about education, focusing on why the rainforest is threatened and how people can help save it. In fact, the Bronx Zoo, under the auspices of The Wildlife Conservation Society, has long placed the utmost of importance on the animals’ welfare and conservation of their environments, and this is evident everywhere you turn. Like humans – or most of us anyway – the animals are most active in the morning, making it an ideal time to start your visit. Feeding times are also a visual treat: Sea lions bark for tasty morsels; penguins waddle side-to-side to the water’s edge and then dart through the water to nab their catch; carmine bee-eaters snap up live crickets and bees on the fly; and white-throated vultures forage for daily deliveries of rats wrapped tightly in twine, which they pick apart just as they would do to their prey in the wild. Reptile fans won’t want to miss the Green Tree Pythons, who cold-bloodedly hunt their furry, warm-blooded lunch.