Assam State Zoo A visit to the Assam State Zoo (Guwahati), 10 March 2014

I arrived at the Assam State Zoo about half an hour before opening time. There were already a dozen people sitting around waiting. Rhesus macaques and house crows were running and flying (respectively) about the car-park. I checked out the entry prices posted on various signs. Adult foreigners were 100 rupees and then, just like the national parks, there were also additional charges for cameras – although at least they make distinctions between different types of camera instead of having a flat rate. A still camera was charged at 40 rupees, a still camera with tele-lens 300 rupees, a digital camera 100 rupees, an 8mm movie camera 400 rupees, a 16mm movie camera 1000 rupees and a home video camera 500 rupees. My camera, a digital SLR with a 300mm lens, was 100 rupees and they didn't know about my other little camera. (For comparisons, at the Alipore Zoo in Kolkata the entry price was 20 rupees and there were no extra charges for cameras). Everyone's bags are checked by a security guard upon entering and all food is removed. There aren't any cafes or restaurants inside the zoo, although there is one right outside the entry point which appeared to sell only snacks and drinks rather than proper food.

Taken as a whole the Assam State Zoo is a very Indian sort of zoo. Anyone who has been to India or seen photos of Indian cities might be able to picture it, with brown dusty paths, grimy concrete walls around the enclosures, rusty metal bars and wire, workers sweeping leaves and sand off to the side with twig-brooms, house crows bouncing about along the railings, little bonfires burning here and there to get rid of rubbish. It all looks very unkempt but also just natural for India. There is a great difference in how various animals are kept. If going clockwise (left) from the entrance the first half of the zoo is mostly good, but the second half is mostly awful. The hooved stock all have large – sometimes extremely large – enclosures, there are some very good primate islands covered in trees, some very good large enclosures for big cats, a very good bear island, some average aviaries and some huge aviaries. And then there are horrible small bear pits, small bare cages for small cats and civets, a vertical cylinder of a cage for an Indian crested porcupine with very little floor area (although at least it had a cave in the middle to sleep inside), tiny pens for hippos, menagerie-style concrete-and-bars cages for leopards, and a whole cluster of appalling cells for monkeys. I honestly don't know how to rate the zoo. Initially I was impressed because the first enclosures I was seeing were the primate islands and the ungulate paddocks, then it went very downhill when I got to the leopards and bears, then it got much better with the lions and more hooved stock, and then it just got all mixed up – good and bad together – before finally finishing with the horrors of the cages in “Primates World”. I think it is a zoo worth visiting but at the same time I am hesitant about recommending it as a zoo to be visited. I did expect it to be considerably better than it was.

Just near the entrance is an Ecological Museum which displays a wide range of stuffed animals and skulls. I think these are mostly ex-zoo animals, but perhaps not all because there are three baby Gangetic dolphins in there as well. Other particularly interesting specimens included four pigmy hogs, a hispid hare, three Chinese pangolins, several clouded leopards, and a marbled cat skin. I visited the museum at the end of my visit and the batteries on my small camera were at the end of their charge so I only managed one photo (of the hispid hare). I couldn't get a photo of the racks of babies and foetuses in jars of preservative, amongst which were pigmy hoglets, baby golden and Nilgiri langurs, baby hog badgers, a rhino foetus, a two day old chimpanzee (born at the zoo in 1979), and also a rhino penis. Most of these seemed to have come from the zoo's collection over the years.


Looking at the zoo census for 2012-2013 Central Zoo Authority I did not see the following important species (which in most cases were certainly no longer on display, although some like the four-horned antelope may have just been missed):

*Four-horned antelope (the enclosure on the map for which they were labelled now contained common muntjacs but they almost certainly should still be at the zoo)
*Golden langur (the moat around their island was dry, but I can presume they are still held at the zoo, simply not able to be displayed that day)
*Hanuman langur (the island was unlabelled and looked unoccupied but they were probably just inside their shelter)
*Chinese pangolin (the species I most hoped would be at the zoo, but I doubt they live long when the zoo does have them – the 2012-2013 census says they had four!)
*Clouded leopard (not on the 2012-2013 census but they used to be at the zoo: the two cages which had held them [the sign was still there] now had Oriental pied hornbills and brown fish owls)
*Asian golden cats (none seen, nor signage)
*Binturong (their island now held common muntjacs)
*Large Indian civet (none seen, nor signage)
*Small-clawed otter (I think these were kept where a mugger now is)
*I didn't see any of the chelonians listed as being present


The very first enclosure upon entering is an island for golden langurs, an endangered monkey found in a very restricted area of northern Assam and Bhutan. It was lucky I had seen these in the wild just three days before, because the moat around the island was drained and there were no langurs on display. I had been hoping to be able to get some better photos here than I had been able to of the wild ones, but thems the breaks. The island itself was quite large and well-planted, and is part of a set of primate islands of a very good standard. The next one along is for hanuman langurs (again with no monkeys to be seen) and the third is a very large one with huge trees for hoolock gibbons (which were out and about, being very active). In very strong contrast to these islands is how the rest of the monkeys are kept, in the grandly-titled Primates World on top of a small hill in the centre of the zoo, where small prison-like cages hold often-solitary animals, several of which were clearly insane. There were two capped langurs in separate cages, individual stump-tailed, Assamese and lion-tailed macaques (the latter lacking his lion tail entirely), and then some Assamese and northern pig-tailed macaques in groups. The slow loris was best off simply by virtue of his small body size allowing him more room in his cage. A group of stump-tailed macaques were also housed elsewhere on an island with climbing structures.

In the same area are tiny cages, just as bad as the monkey cages, for civets. There are eight of these, all in a row, all but one completely barren of anything except a couple of branches (the odd one out had a big clump of bamboo growing in it). Only two cages had labels, one for small Indian civet and the other just saying “Civet”. Although the cages were bare, the doors to the inside sections were open so in four of the cages I could not see any animals. In three cages I saw common palm civets (two of them stereotyping badly) and in one I saw a small Indian civet. Apart for golden jackals and a striped hyaena (both in horrible tiny cages) and the cats, the only other small carnivore I saw at the zoo were small Indian mongooses which are a very common wild species, even in urban areas. Here there were a couple of dozen in a circular moated enclosure, much like how you would see meerkats displayed in a Western zoo. They make a very good display animal because they are diurnal and quite active.

The small cats, as far as I saw, consisted of just leopard cats and jungle cats. A row of three cages held maybe ten leopard cats; these were small and concrete with mesh fronts, empty of furnishings but for some shelves and a few branches. The jungle cats and more leopard cats (I only saw one of each, so not sure of actual numbers) were in much larger cages which appeared to be old leopard cages. They were how you'd probably imagine a leopard cage in a 19th century Indian zoo – concrete, bars, little else (a bit shockingly, the zoo only opened in 1958). The inside of the bars had been covered in mesh to keep the small cats from walking out.

Most of the big cats at the zoo were much better off.... except the leopards which remained in the old-style cages (four or five cages but I only saw one leopard, who was either very old or very sick). The Asiatic lions had a huge enclosure with a dry moat at the front which they could also enter. The enclosure was over twice as large as it appeared because it stretched right up the hillside behind, the fence just visible in a few places between the thick trees. The main tiger enclosure was even larger; it was an elongated shape, surrounded completely by a high concrete wall and the viewing was from an enclosed overhead walkway at one end. On the other side of the walkway was viewing down into three white tiger enclosures which were much smaller (at first I thought they were the holding areas). I also saw another tiger at the zoo, in a tiny tiny tiny cage which was just despicable. The Asiatic black bears were likewise contrastingly housed well and badly. The main bear enclosure was a huge hill-island, covered in grass with a few trees, but next to it (past the awful leopard cages) were two small round pit-type enclosures for more bears, one of which was displaying severe mental issues and another of which was almost bald.

The hooved animals, as I said earlier, are generally housed very well at the zoo. Most of them are in large or even huge enclosures. The only real exceptions are the common hippos which are in miniscule pens each consisting of a small pool and a pathway of dirt around the perimeter of the pool. There were I think six hippos in all, in four enclosures. I missed the elephants (somehow I always seem to miss the elephants on zoo visits!); I did see one in the distance – through my binoculars! – on top of the hill behind the sambar paddock but I can't comment on their housing. There are a lot of sambar at the zoo, easily fifty or more, and at first I thought that their paddock, even though it was large, was overcrowded. But then I realised that the entire hill up behind this large paddock was also part of the enclosure! On a zoo scale, it was enormous! The blackbuck next door also had a hillside for an enclosure, and because it was well-treed I couldn't even tell where the limits of it were. Not as huge but still very large was the hillside paddock for sangai (Indian brow-antlered deer). Hog deer and common muntjac were well-housed (the muntjacs were also being used as space-fillers in several enclosures, some less roomy than others but all adequate; I also saw a few roaming free around the zoo). Axis deer shared a very large flat enclosure with an Indian rhino, and there were also off-show breeding areas for the rhinos. The serow had a large hill-slope paddock. The one I saw was a weird red colour; I'm not sure if this is normal for Indian serows (I've only ever seen black-coloured serows) and it was resting behind a tree so I could only get photos of its head. The last of the Indian ungulates at the zoo were the nilgai which were housed in a very unusual circular enclosure which I think must have originally been for lions or tigers because it was surrounded by high concrete walls with barred sections for viewing. The only exotic ungulates apart for the hippos were a white rhino and a giraffe, both in fairly large pens.

In general the birds at the zoo were housed either well or “alright”. The worst off were some birds of prey (mostly black kites, but also a steppe eagle and a mountain hawk-eagle) in a rather overcrowded aviary, but as I personally don't like seeing birds of prey in cages that is partly just my personal bias. Most of the birds were all in one area. The peafowl were in a quite small aviary which was surprising (in that they could have been shown well free-range as in other zoos around the world). Other species here were budgies, Indian ringnecks, moustached parakeets, peach-faced lovebirds, a lesser sulphur-crested cockatoo, blue and gold macaws, lots of hill mynahs, a barn owl, several Asian koels (the only time I have seen these in a zoo), a helmeted guineafowl, red junglefowl, and kalij, golden and silver pheasants. Elsewhere there was a massive waterbird aviary in which relatively little could be seen, although what I did see included cattle egrets, pond herons, black-headed ibis, ruddy and common shelducks, lesser whistling ducks, spot-billed ducks, gadwalls, wigeons and ferruginous ducks. A nearby aviary held three greater adjutants in breeding plumage, and there was a large group of white pelicans on an island which still had the remains of the sign of its original inhabitant (“Noisy Gibbon”). Randomly-sited aviaries here and there included a large one for Himalayan griffon and cinereous vultures behind “Primates World”, and the former clouded leopard cages which were now two huge aviaries for Oriental pied hornbills and brown fish owls. There were also common cassowaries (or at least one) in an average-sized yard, and several emus in a large well-planted enclosure.

Finally, reptiles. The gharials had a large pool surrounded by a lot of land which, being gharials, they were never going to use. I wondered if it had previously been for something else. On the other side of the zoo was a mugger in a small circular enclosure with an equally circular pool in the centre; this I suspected used to be an otter pen (there are no otters currently at the zoo as far as I saw). The rest of the reptiles are housed in the Reptile House. Strange that. This was the oddest design I have seen and really reminded me of an old-style museum. In the centre of the circular building was a tall terrarium for Burmese pythons (aka Indian rock pythons), and right around the perimeter were smaller tanks with glass lids and fronts, really looking just like museum cases rather than reptile tanks. All the inhabitants were snakes, and all had the same furnishings: sand substrate, a pile of dead grass for hiding, a couple of branches for climbing, and a water dish. A lot of the snakes were invisible naturally enough, but the signage was for monocled cobra (Naja kaouthia), banded krait (Bungarus fasciatus), green cat-snake (Boiga cyanea), copper-headed trinket snake (Coelegnathus radiatus), Indian rat-snake (Ptyas mucosa), ornate flying snake (Chrysopelia ornata), common sand boa (Eryx conicus) and red sand boa (Eryx johnii). There was also an unlabelled tank with a red-necked keelback (Rhabdophis subminiatus) – I recognised that one because I had seen a couple of wild ones recently – and another species I don't know (pictured here: http://www.zoochat.com/755/indian-snake-species-358180/)

The Assam State Zoo focuses on native north-eastern Indian animals, and so although there are some species from further south on the subcontinent (e.g. Asian lions and the lion-tailed macaque) there are very few non-Indian species – in the mammals only hippos, a white rhino and a giraffe, and in the birds only cassowary, emus, a guineafowl, golden pheasant, and a few parrots. This is commendable of course, but it is a shame that the zoo has so many bad and very bad cages in which to display those animals. It does no service to the animals themselves, and it certainly doesn't instill any sense of caring about animals in the visiting public. It would be great if the bad cages could be replaced with housing of the standard seen in other parts of the zoo, like the lion and ungulate enclosures and the primate islands, but I fear that would be a long time coming.

 

yes I'm more or less sure the golden langurs (and probably hanumans) are still there, just not visible.

I saw hybrid lions on the CZA census so I also assume the lions (labelled as Asiatic) are just so.

 

ah, but I have only uploaded half the photos so far... and they are being uploaded more or less in the order I took them and the first half of the zoo was the one with all the good enclosures.....

Over the next few weeks I should manage to get the rest uploaded hopefully.

 

I have finished uploading photos to the gallery now: Assam State Zoo Gallery

As previously mentioned the lens on my small camera (the one I use for enclosures) had an unnoticed smudge or something on the lens so the left half of all those photos have a blur to them. Sorry about that.