OK, this exhibit is not so bad in the flesh as it looks in photos - it\'s bigger than it appears for a start. But it\'s still not very good.
What is truly funny is that 5 minutes ago I just finished responding to a comment on the series of photos I uploaded from the impressive orangutan forest at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. Then I see this new shot uploaded and I have to wince...the crap that is in Colchester should be used for the zoo exhibit designers instead of orangs!
What's most frustrating about this exhibit is that it's the fourth high-value ape house in the UK in recent years. The designers seem to have looked at London's Gorilla Kingdom, Edinburgh's Budongo chimp house, and Chester's Realm of the Red Ape, then took all the faults of each exhibit, and combined them. Bizarre. Budongo and Red Ape are both excellent for the animals - Budongo has a little too much empty visitor space, and Red Ape not quite enough - but both very good. Gorilla Kingdom is never going to be my favourite exhibit but it seems to be improving with age as it gets furnished better. This is just bad.
Did anyone designing this think "here's an idea, orangutans swing through the tree tops, so why don't we put this in the design?" What's annoying is a lot of their enclosures (e.g.- Cherry mangabey) look very good for the animals.
I still don't see what's so hard about getting real logs to hide food in and real rocks and/or boulders to build a cave from (cemented together of course), or putting in some species of grass that grows tall. What about some ropes made from natural fibers instead of what looks like green plastic? This enclosure (apart from appearing narrow, which doesn't help the sparse appearence, since if you plant bushes anywhere in here, they're liable to be used as an escape route) seems really plastic to me.
If you do a search on 'Orangutan Forest' in both the forums and the gallery, there have already been quite a few threads which all state incredulity at how Colchester missed an opportunity to make this a really decent, stimulating enclosure for poor old Rajang. Lots of us like the idea of 'roofing' the enclosure with scaffolding-like bars and mesh (the height could be increased above the current rock edging), thus providing somewhere from which many more vertical ropes could be hung - and thus providing Rajang with a facility to brachiate if he so wishes ! The total lack of greenery bar a couple of pond reeds and the odd bit of leaf sprout on the single living tree is so sad.
