Pinniped Exhibit at Hannover, 23/03/13

Home to a mix of Baltic Grey Seals, Californian Sea Lions and Northern Fur Seals - and also equipped with a wave machine (on one of its lower power settings here).

This Canadian-themed area (Yukon Bay) seems like a far superior version of Pittsburgh Zoo's Water's Edge complex. Hannover is an enormously popular zoo (1.6 million annual visitors) and there are several large-scale, themed exhibit areas. Maguari, how would you rate Yukon Bay and the zoo as a whole? Also, are the wave-machines set to speed up at specific times throughout the day?

I like Hannover a lot. My usual caveat to heavily-themed zoos applies - I wouldn't like every zoo to be like that - but generally it works well. For me, Yukon Bay was very impressive and probably my favourite of the themed areas - the African area is good but like any tropical-themed exhibit outdoors in northern Europe is never quite going to look spot-on. I'd want to see Outback in the summer before making a judgement as it wasn't at full strength in the remnants of snow. I'm not a huge fan of the Jungle Palace area for Asian species - bits of it are great but there's a lot of (what feels to me like) wasted space and not enough greenery. The Meyershof farm area is one of the best I've seen - with real German farm buildings moved to the site brick-by-brick.

For this type of exhibit, Yukon Bay suits me very well - consistent, attractive and imaginative theming, good quality catering built in (including supposedly Canadian English pale ale in German, if you can believe such a thing), very good viewing and a pleasing mix of species, including both familiar ABCs and weird rarities. Indeed, the area has by my count nine mammal taxa* and three of them were new to me (the caribou, squirrel and fur seal - rising to four if you count the Baltic Grey Seals, which I'd seen before but not realised until afterwards!).


*Mackenzie River Wolf, Woodland Caribou, Wood Bison, Black-tailed Prairie Marmot, Northern Fur Seal, Baltic Grey Seal, California Sea Lion, Polar Bear, American Red Squirrel. The area also has Sandhill Cranes, Wild Turkeys, a selection of North American waterfowl (housed in the Africa section over the winter!), Black-footed Penguins, Peruvian Brown Pelicans and Snowy Owls - and a large shoal of trout that usually reside in the polar bear pool but as that had been under refurbishment were in the penguin pool when we were there!