Auckland Zoo Map 1926

Auckland Zoo Map April 1926.

From the Second edition of the zoo\'s guidebook.

I think this is definitely the most exciting map, around this time the zoo reached its highest species counts. People were donating animals from all over, and the director had returned from Africa the previous year with 13 different antelope species, giraffe, zebra, and 515 birds.

After this, however, the great depression, WWII and import restrictions greatly reduced the rate of new arrivals, and little provision had been made for acquiring breeding groups, so much so that by 1950 there was a much smaller collection, and the map shows several enclosures empty or with various domestic species. While the zoo collection increased throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it never reached the peaks of the mid to late-1920s, and collection rationalisation from the 1970s downsized it to the current collection.

Built lots of aviaries

I hope that the enclosures on this map weren't to scale. The elephant exhibit seems to be the smallest mammal enclosure, only slightly larger than the skinks! Has Auckland Zoo always had only Asian elephants, or were there some Africans also through the years?

Thanks for posting the maps zooboy; it is great fun seeing how the zoo has changed over a century.

Auckland has only ever held Asian elephants. The "exhibit" shown on the map is just the Elephant House, the elephants didn't actually get an enclosure per se until 1992. You will note the Elephant Pool nearby however, and also that Auckland Zoo's elephants have always been managed Free Contact (FC) so are walked daily. Indeed, they gave rides until almost 1970, and the most famous elephant, Jamuna (who lived at the zoo from 1923-1965) gave an estimated 750,000 children rides.