Tree Hill Nature Center

November 21, 2024 - By cdoughman1

If you are looking for a budget friendly place to go I would highly recommend the Tree Hill Nature Center. It is located at 7152 Lone Star Rd. Jax Fl 32211. It offers a museum, an animal exhibit, beautiful walking trails, a community garden, a butterfly house, and an Ampitheater.

Disclaimer- Tree Hill Nature Center is not sponsoring this post nor are we getting paid to advertise for the business. We genuinely enjoyed our time here and thought it was worth sharing about.

The museum center is located inside the main office to the left of the front desk. It contains a few statues and animal skeletons. You are greeted by a brown bear and what looks to be a mammoth skull with tusks. On down the hall you will find cases of native insects and native animal skeletons.

A giant Sloth

The next exhibit we got to see was the reptile exhibit. It mostly consisted of turtles and venomous snakes. I didn’t get too many pictures of the snakes, but there were a couple of eastern diamond back rattle snakes encased behind glass.

These turtles did not move an inch. We thought they were fake. You are allowed to touch the turtles with 2 fingers only. They were very much real.

My son thought the turtle shell was awesome.

Next we headed outside to the petting zoo before hitting the trails. The chickens were used to being handled. They were not afraid and easy to catch. The goats, well they expected to be fed so they were friendly as well. You could feed them and touch them. My kids loved feeding the goats. Only cost $2 per cup of food. They had a couple of pigs close to the goats. We also saw some alligators and an owl close by.

This hen came right up to me and allowed me to scoop her right up so the kids could touch her.

The enclosure was pretty cool. They had their own goat bridge. There was a ton of room for the goats to wander around.

Piggie here eventually woke up and moved closer to the fence and allowed us to pet him.

We also enjoyed walking the nature trails. I didn’t get many pictures while walking the trails but we did eventually get to the Ampitheater before heading back to the main office.

There are plenty of benches along the way which is helpful for the little kids who need to stop and rest their legs or the parent who is stuck carrying all of the backpacks and water bottles. It was also nice that they had a working water fountain to fill up the water bottles. All in all, my family really enjoyed our time here and we only spent $28 total. It was easy to get to. We didn’t have to travel far

Let me know in the comments if you have ever been here with your family and if you have any suggestions on other budget friendly places to take a family of four.