There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a room when a naturalist lifts the lid off a terrarium and reaches inside. It is not quite fear and not quite delight, but something in between. On Tuesday, October 6, that moment comes to Roselle Park in Ada, where the Holland-based nonprofit will set up shop from 6 to 7 p.m. for an hour called Creepy Critters of Michigan.
The premise is simple and a little subversive. Michigan is home to a genuinely strange cast of characters, and most of them get a bad rap. The program promises amphibians, arachnids, reptiles, birds, and mammals, framed as animals "that some people may find weird but others may find fascinating." There will be live animal ambassadors to see up close, and a table's worth of hands-on artifacts, the pelts and shells and shed skins that let a kid touch what they might otherwise only glimpse at the edge of a pond.
The choice of venue is fitting. Roselle Park, at 1010 Grand River Drive NE, is a 240-acre-plus nature preserve that has already lived one life and been reborn into another. The land was formerly home to the Ada Beef Company, a working operation on the banks of the Grand River. Today it is a mix of natural and restored landscape, with a paved loop trail that runs a little over three miles, low marsh that sometimes floods when the river rises in spring, and a resource building that opened in 2016. It is the kind of place where the ground itself tells a story about what gets discarded and what gets reclaimed, which is not a bad backdrop for an evening about animals people tend to write off.
The Outdoor Discovery Center, for its part, has its own origin story worth knowing. The organization was founded in 2000 and is now the flagship campus of the ODC Network, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Holland. What began as a single nature center has grown into something considerably larger: the network manages two nature centers, two greenways, a water quality initiative for Lake Macatawa, and several nature-based early childhood education centers across West Michigan. Its main preserve, at 4214 56th Street in Holland, spans roughly 160 acres of ponds, remnant dunes, wetlands, meadows, remnant prairie, and lowland hardwood forest, threaded by three miles of trails and anchored by a Visitors Center, a Birds of Prey Center, and a Nature Play Park. The organization marked its 25th anniversary in 2025, celebrating a run in which, by its own accounting, it has preserved thousands of acres of native habitat and connected more than 1.5 million people to nature.
That scale matters for an event like this one. Live animal ambassadors are not a casual undertaking. Housing, feeding, and caring for education animals is a year-round commitment, and the ODC's Birds of Prey Center in particular has become known around West Michigan for putting hawks, owls, and other raptors in front of audiences that would never otherwise get within arm's reach of one. The same institutional muscle is what allows a traveling program to show up at a county park with living animals rather than photographs of them.
What makes the Roselle Park evening unusual is the price structure. Admission is $15 per household, not per person. That is a small but meaningful decision. A family of five pays the same as a solo adult, and there is no per-seat cap squeezing anyone out. For a program built around touching things and leaning in close, that flat rate changes who shows up. It turns an hour on a Tuesday night into something a whole household can do together without doing arithmetic first.
While pre-registration is highly encouraged, it is not required. That combination, a low barrier and a low price, is roughly the opposite of how most Halloween-season programming works. There is no haunted house here, no jump scare, no actor in a mask. The bet the Outdoor Discovery Center is making is that a real spider, a real snake, and a real owl are more interesting than anything fabricated, and that the shiver they produce is the useful kind.
It is a reasonable bet, and the calendar helps. Early October in West Michigan is when the natural world starts behaving in ways that reward attention. Amphibians are moving toward their winter refuges. Spiders that spent the summer hidden are suddenly conspicuous. Birds of prey are on the move. The animals on the program's list are not exotic imports rounded up for a seasonal theme; they are the neighbors, the ones already living in the marsh and the woods along the Grand River.
That is the quiet argument underneath the title. Calling something a creepy critter is a joke, but it is also a concession, an acknowledgment that most people learn to fear these animals before they learn anything true about them. An hour with a naturalist and a live animal tends to dissolve that pretty quickly. The spider stops being a symbol and becomes an animal with legs and habits and a job to do. The snake stops being a threat and becomes a body that is warm to the touch. By the time the artifacts come out and the kids are passing around a shed skin, the word "creepy" has usually lost most of its power.
Roselle Park sits at the edge of the Grand River in Ada, a village that has spent the past several years rebuilding its downtown around walkability and outdoor access. The park's paved paths, its restrooms and drinking fountains, and its natural play area make it an easy place to bring a family on a weeknight, which is presumably why Ada Parks & Recreation and the ODC chose it. The program runs one hour, from 6 to 7 p.m., which leaves just enough daylight to walk the loop afterward and see whether anything is moving in the marsh.
For $15, a household gets an hour of live animals, a pile of things to touch, and a naturalist who has almost certainly heard every version of "is it poisonous?" that exists. The animals, for their part, will do what they always do, which is be themselves in front of an audience that came expecting something else. That gap between expectation and reality is where the learning happens.