Arrived into Eindhoven today to embark on a 10 day, 10 zoo trip, starting at BestZoo. The eastern spotted skunks are now on show in the barn near the meerkats; saw one on-show but it was a bit skittish in the afternoon when it was awake. Great to see dorcopsis again (first since Rare Species) and saw the sole white-face ibis. Few other first sightings (Japanese squirrel/Allen's gallinule) but the highlight of the day - we met the owner who took us behind the scenes, where we met another pair of spotted skunks, some tawny frogmouths and we held a woolly opossum!
Perhaps you should consider a separate thread for your Dutch gallivanting - I am sure it would prove very popular!
You lucky bastards the White-faced Ibis, Japanese Squirrel and Allen's Gallinule were offshow for the winter when I visited in February and unlike yourselves I had no such luck when it came to being taken offshow. As for the woolly opossum, that goes beyond lucky bastardry given the fact I have never seen an opossum of any description before.
Unfortunately, the Netherlands doesn't seem to have any captive bustards, lucky or otherwise. Amsterdam had great and little bustards, Hilvarenbeek had white-bellied bustards and Alphen aan den Rijn, Amersfoort, Rotterdam and Wassenaar had Kori bustards.
Wow, a woolly opossum! I have some plans to visit Best (in combination with Volkel and maybe De Paay dependig on whether or not lesser grison and civet are on display) this summer, mainly for the skunks and the scrub wallabies, but I think I ask up front if seeing the opossum is possible.
Zie-Zoo has received some Siberian weasel from Russia, de Paay and Faunapark Flakkee, 2 other small Dutch zoos also received some from the same import. Vuurwezels in Nederlandse zoo's | Zoosite
A bit of a correction; that link says BestZoo received them along with the other two zoos you mentioned, Zie-ZOO isn't mentioned.
Next stop today on my rare small mammals trip was Best Zoo. The park and the enclosures were quite unchanged compared to my last visit, but the on-show collection had two major additions. I saw one spotted skunk, inhabiting the former armadillo enclosure in the shed next to the meerkats. At first it was sleeping, but in the end I saw it quite active (making a decent photo wasn't easy). The Hagen's scrub wallabies were very active, in an enclosure shared with cockatoos and masked lapwings. I mailed the zoo earlier this week to ask of it was possible to see the opossums, but it wasn't.
Last Saturday, May 25th 2019, BestZoo became the second small Dutch zoo I visited this year (I visited Zie-Zoo in early April) and my 48th zoo I've visited overall. So here is a "short" review. First off all, for those visiting the park: you might face some challenges finding the parking area. BestZoo shares its parking area with a few other recreational facilities located in the same area (a pancake restaurant with extremely noisy guests on their front patio/terrace, an artisanal soap-making business and a quadracycle rental and riding business) and it wasn't very well indicated just where the entrance to the parking area was. Also when we left there were a lot of people and vehicles crowding up the small road - so be careful when you visit. BestZoo proved to be one of the few zoos I've visited that didn't have any kind of map anywhere - no leaflets, no signs with a map, nothing of the sort. I thought this was strange as even most small zoos I've visited had at least a basic map. The park did have a walking route but it wasn't indicated all that well. I enjoyed the visit and I toured the entire park, which isn't very large, twice and some areas three or four times. The collection was fairly interesting and again I saw some new, interesting and rare species I had not seen in real life before and I also saw some nice species I hadn't seen for a while again. Sadly as rarely displayed species go, the Eastern spotted skunk (Spilogale putorius) and Allen's gallinule (Porphyrio alleni) didn't seem to be on display anymore. Also very interesting were a pretty impressive five Sri Lankan leopards as well as two black jaguars (mother and cub) that were pretty active. As far as the exhibits at BestZoo go... well, it's definitely not the best zoo, to go with that kind of no-brainer (Best is just the village it's located in). Definitely no big immersive or innovative exhibits here. The exhibits were a pretty mixed bag, with some decent exhibits both in terms of animal welfare and aesthetics as well as some exhibits that were decent for the animals but not much in terms of looks. The big cats, admittedly the most spectacular species at BestZoo as far as the general public goes, were in my opinion housed in cages that were on the small side and perhaps a little too open, but not totally inadequate. The leopards and jaguars did however seem healthy and they were pretty active, without showing any stereotypical behavior. Some exhibits were pretty ugly to be honest and some (in many cases the same ones) also seemed to be pretty old and looked worn out, beyond their years and in need of some renovations, or in some cases of a complete overhaul/rebuild. That said, the newer enclosures in the park did look better, more modern and better furnished, generally. Some of the exhibits were inhabited by somewhat odd mixes of species that I found in some cases questionable (i.e. pheasant and kookaburra). And there were also a few pretty poor exhibits in the park - in my opinion the old lynx and serval cages were the worst. Luckily a third of those cages no longer held medium-sized cats but large chickens. The yellow-throated marten cages also were some of the worst cages in the park and to be honest some of the ugliest exhibits I've ever seen. One of the martens was also disturbingly stereotypical, as was the park's male raccoon, when he was not playing the role of shag carpet. Something that I also noticed during the feeding tour I took, led by a very young keeper (more about that below) is that some of the aviary-type exhibits that housed birds or tamarins only had a single door rather than a double set of doors, making it much easier for animals to escape by walking or flying past a keeper entering the exhibit. In fact Saturday a vulturine guineafowl had escaped in just that fashion and for a while perched rather perilously on the fencing of the banded mongoose exhibit (but was luckily caught and returned to its aviary, which it shares with hornbills, within a few hours). The staff members that we saw were mostly young to very young and quite obviously inexperienced. I already mentioned the guineafowl incident, although admittedly that could also happen to experienced people (I had a similar situation with a rooster myself) and was, I have to give them this, certainly adequately handled and resolved. However, during the feeding tour the young keeper, possibly only an intern, showed clumsiness with the food dishes and also displayed a limited knowledge about animals and openly admitted to not knowing much about many animals, and he also made several mistakes in the information he did give. Without bragging or belittling him, I'm pretty sure I know more about at least some of the animal than he did. I'm willing to give the guy credit though as he did his best and is still learning, but someone should have armed him with or made him arm himself with more basic animal knowledge. In terms of exhibits, animal care and catering BestZoo did in my opinion show some degree of amateurism that you wouldn't see at larger zoos or even at some small zoos (like Zie-Zoo, which in my opinion seemed substantially more professional than Best). The food we got served at BestZoo was pretty poor quality and it took pretty long to prepare. It wasn't quite as bad as the food at Mondo Verde (the worst I ever had at any zoo) but I've had much better meals at zoos (and at Zie-Zoo the food was also better). I personally wouldn't exactly recommend eating at BestZoo. I must also mention that photography at BestZoo is rather challenging as there is a lot of wire and mesh, and where there were glass viewing panels they were regularly quite dirty or had problematic reflections in them. I have yet to see my own results, I hope it isn't too awful. All in all my experience at BestZoo was a mixed bag but I don't have overwhelmingly negative feelings about the place and I did enjoy my visit - the advantage of smaller zoos can be that at least sometimes they aren't as busy as the large ones and Best was pretty calm last Saturday. However, when it comes to small Dutch zoos, I believe I'll probably be doing a repeat visit to Zie-Zoo much sooner than I will to Best, unless something drastically changes at the place. I've been there, I've seen it, I know what it's like, but it's not really something to repeat. I'm going to try to post photos eventually with further commentary on specific exhibits, but this post will be it with regards to a review.
I'm pretty sure this is a thread for the Netherlands Zoo called "BestZoo", not a thread about what you consider the "best zoo" if that makes sense.
