Leopard Forest

Client: Nashville Zoo at Grassmere

Project Location: Nashville, TN

Completion: 2025

The Leopard Forest at the Nashville Zoo is a highly immersive, multi-species habitat complex designed to transport visitors into a realistic African woodland environment. Its key features include an overhead leopard bridge, an elevated wildlife corridor that allows rare cats to walk directly above the visitor pathway for an up-close view and a towering tree canopy to simulate a dense native forest ecosystem. It also includes elevated walkways that give visitors dynamic eye-level vantage points along with a hamerkop nest building crafted to resemble the distinctive nest of the African hamerkop waterbird. Alongside the critically endangered Amur leopards, the winding trail serves as a gateway to the zoo’s African animal exhibits, including black-and-white colobus monkeys, De Brazza’s monkeys, and klipspringers, which are small African antelopes.