Global Wildlife Center

A 900-acre preserve in Folsom holds about 1,000 free-roaming animals — giraffes, zebras, camels, bison, kangaroos, deer — across open pasture an hour north of New Orleans. Visitors tour in covered safari wagons or private 4x4 vehicles, accompanied by guides who teach animal facts, behaviors, habitat, and conservation. The animals aren't fenced relative to you; you pass through their range, and they know the vehicles. Founder Ken Matherne established it. Following his death in fall 2021, his daughter Maci Matherne took over management. The North Shore sits along Lake Pontchartrain, a 630-square-mile estuary that shapes the region's identity. The lake receives freshwater from five rivers — the Tangipahoa, Tchefuncte, Tickfaw, Amite, and Bogue Falaya — and two bayous, Lacombe and Chinchuba. It comprises more than 125,000 acres of wetland, including bottomland hardwoods, cypress swamps, and a complex mixture of fresh, intermediate, and brackish marsh. The Pontchartrain Basin is one of the largest estuarine systems along the Gulf Coast. Wildlife here exists at the intersection of freshwater and salt, delta and estuary — the preserve occupies land within that larger watershed, in St. Tammany Parish, one of the six parishes the estuary touches. Human habitation of the Pontchartrain region began at least 3,500 years ago. The Pontchartrain Basin itself covers a 10,000-square-mile watershed spanning sixteen Louisiana parishes and four Mississippi counties. This is not wilderness reclaimed; it is land that has always held life at the edge of water.