CGSwans flies north for the winter

A triple shot post, today, I'm afraid. I'm in a hectic stretch of the trip for both writing projects, so hopefully I can keep things on track. After Ljubljana I hit three very significant collections in the space of a week, and I don't want to fall behind.

Zoo #26 - Dubrovnik Aquarium, 8/06/2017

This tiny place is, by a considerable distance, the smallest collection I expect to visit on this trip. It's the public display arm of a marine research institute based in Dubrovnik, and exhibits only local Adriatic Sea fauna. When I say tiny, I mean it's tiny - a total of 30 tanks, none more than a couple of thousand litres in volume. It has a couple of moderate sized concrete pools set into the floor (one houses a rehab sea turtle, with signage assuring visitors that the pool meets EAZA standards), but most exhibits are set into the walls or in free-standing banks of tanks. A pressed-for-time Zoochatter could be in and out in five minutes. I lingered for perhaps half an hour.

To be honest, the collection here was not very interesting, although given the relatively uncommon collection theme it might well be worthwhile for life tick hunters. For me, though, the drawcard was the unique setting: it's built within the fortress of St John, part of the Dubrovnik City Walls, and it's a gorgeous place to put an aquarium. Fish tanks take the place of cannons in the casements, and the inevitable marine-themed visual effects dance across a vaulted brick ceiling.

It looks a bit like a themed section of a Sea Life Centre, only this one wasn't flat-packed in an aquarium-equivalent of IKEA and assembled on site. It's real. That might be both its blessing and its curse, though: as what might perhaps be the only public aquarium in a UNESCO World Heritage listed building, expansion is impossible and even any alterations are severely limited.

I wouldn't go out of your way for this one, and at 60 kuna - about €8.50 - it's overpriced. But it's a cool setting, and I caught myself wondering if it couldn't perhaps become one part of a bigger facility. Dubrovnik, as a major (and already pricey) seaside tourist destination, would be a great location for a major aquarium, obviously outside the Old Town, and the existing aquarium could be included in the same ticket. Of course, knowing our luck McMerlin would run the thing.

Zoo #27, Zoo Zagreb, 15/06/2017

We've already established a pattern that my reactions to zoos often revert to the mean of expectations: with a couple of exceptions, I tend to be quietly disappointed when I visit one of the global elite, and then pleasantly surprised - sometimes ecstatically so - when I then go to one that isn't expected to offer much. Park Zagreb in the latter category.

I only had one full day in the city, and I'd managed to pick out a public holiday I'd never heard of (Corpus Christi). I discovered this only after wandering about a strangely deserted old town and finding that multiple museums I had considered visiting were closed. Ho hum, but at least the zoo was sticking to its normal hours, and at this time of year that means closing at eight. I wish, I wish, I wish Australian zoos would do this too. In January it's light until 9PM at home: I could knock off work at 5, be at Melbourne Zoo at 5:30 and do an entire circuit in the cool of the evening, rather than being forced to contend with weekend crowds. But that veers far too close to being focused on a good visitor experience for an Australian zoo.

Anyway. I couldn't stay until 8 because one of the few vego restaurants I'd found to be open was closing then, but I could stay until 6:30 or so, and thus I semi-took advantage of Europe's enlightened zoo visiting hours. Because I knew the zoo was small - only 7 hectares - I arrived about 4, feeling confident that I could see it all comfortably in that time.

I was right, as it turned out, but the visit was more rushed and stressful than it needed to be. Partly that's because I underestimated the size and quality of the zoo's indoor spaces, and partly it's because of a horrendous lack of signage at the zoo. There's a map as you enter, but after that you're on your own, and they don't hand out maps either. Because it's an old-fashioned layout with lots of turning back in and around itself, it's hard to navigate and the lack of signage meant I wasn't at all confident I was seeing everything. All I could do was find what bits I could, review the map once I got back to the entrance, and then double back for anything I missed: when I did so I found that I'd missed a tapir exhibit, but decided I could live with it and went for dinner.

Compounding my disorientation was the way the zoo uses water features as the only physical barrier (at least on one side) between it and the surrounding city park. It's gorgeous, and it creates an illusion of enormous space in what is in reality a very small, narrow zoo. But it did make it hard to be sure whether I'd been everywhere, especially considering the same water features wind in and out of portions of the zoo, as well.

As an aside, there's a delightful touch here in which each of the paths is named after an eminent naturalist or conservationist - in addition to some Croatian names I didn't recognise were the likes of Charles Darwin, Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, Bernard Grzimek and Gerald Durrell. The only thing that would have made thistle satisfying is a map that showed me which street was where! But I shouldn't labour that point.

Anyway. The zoo itself. It's genuinely good and, pound for pound, would hold its own against most of the zoos I've visited in Europe thus far. It is the fifth post-Communist zoo I've visited and it is the best so far: it's less ambitious and more successful than Budapest, which is more complete but compromises on quality to achieve it.

Zagreb has only half a roster of ABC mammals - there are lions, leopards, brown and sun bears, sea lions, zebras and chimpanzees, but there are no tigers, elephants, giraffes, rhinos, gorillas or orang-utans, and the only hippo is a pygmy. There's a cheetah exhibit in which I didn't see a cheetah but found plenty of tortoises, which is either a very daring mix or an indication the cheetahs aren't there. The exhibits for these ABCs vary in quality, but are mostly at the lower end of Zagreb's scale. A very new looking lion enclosure is the exception here: it's a bit mock-rocky but a good size, and it might be what passes as a naturalistic exhibit on a Zagreb budget.

Small mammal exhibits are pretty much all of a kind, except that the coypu exhibit is overflowing with copious coypus: there are at least 30 of them. An interesting mix that I regretted not getting to see in action - because the animals were all locked inside their respective night quarters in the huge and meandering rainforest house - were lar gibbons, otters and giant anteaters.

The bird collection is modest and pretty much standard, but where Zagreb knocked me out was the depth and breadth of its reptile collection, which sprawls out across at least different buildings - the afore-mentioned rainforest house, small North American and African-themed buildings and the 'Snakes of Croatia' building, which houses, in gorgeous big vivariums, what I assume is an encyclopaedic collection of native snakes as well as a legless lizard for comparison's sake. There's a lot of viperids here, and it's one of the very few European zoos I've visited with a substantial venomous collection. Zagreb might also have given me a new favourite reptile: I can't remember the last time I saw a new species and audibly gasped, but I did when I first saw a turquoise gecko.

Even the conventional, usually boring species do well here: I saw an albino Burmese python climbing right up to the top of branches in its' corner office-sized enclosure, and even an anaconda was up on a branch, and it struck me how rarely giant constrictors have anything other than a tiled floor and a basin of water to work with. Give them the opportunity and they might just show off for you. Overall, the general standard of reptile exhibit here has only been matched or exceeded only by Zurich, Basel and Vienna so far on this trip. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Zoo #28 - Zoo Ljubljana, 17/06/2017

I'm writing this through a fog of exhaustion so thick I can barely see the screen to type, but hopefully it works out ok. I didn't get off to a great start on Ljubljana Zoo day: an already obscene wake-up of 5:40 for a Swans AFL match was brought forward by three hours as first one, then three more inconsiderate brutes came into the dorm at 2:40 and 4:20AM, respectively. If you're arriving then, fine, but give some thought to the fact that people are sleeping and finish your conversation outside.

Can you tell I'm a bit grumpy?

Anyway, it's the day after now and I'm even worse, having stupidly misread when my train booking was due to leave Ljubljana, missing it, and having to get a Flixbus at the cost of €40 and two hours less sleep at my overnight stopping point. I reckon I've slept about 8 hours in the last 50. I'm struggling. The zoo provided two of the best of those 50 hours, though. The best of all was the last hour of the footy, after we came from six goals behind to keep our season alive.

The national zoo of Slovenia this might be, but in practical terms it's a small regional city zoo: Ljubljana is a city or less than 300,000 people, the capital of a country of about two million. Like most regional city zoos the collection is modest, and Ljubljana leans heavily on child-friendly attractions - playgrounds, trampolines, mechanical diggers, ropes courses - to get families through the gates. It's certainly a zoo first and amusement park second, though, so it didn't annoy me. You've gotta do what you've gotta do.

Serving a local clientele, the species line-up here is close to as ABC as it gets. There are tokenistic bird and reptile collections - the latter concentrated in a room with about 15 small tanks, which also include a couple of amphibians, some inverts, spiny mice and a tenrec, which is the most outré species in the zoo. The birds are a mix of parrots, owls, pelicans, swans, Canada geese, black storks and ratites. The parrots - and some of the owls - are in a row of aviaries with heavy, dark mesh that makes viewing into a couple of them quite difficult.

It's really about the mammals, then. There's maybe 30 species or so, most of which are in the older, lower portion of the zoo (an expansion is underway up the hill behind this core area, of which more in a moment). None of the enclosures in this section are intrinsically very interesting but most are more than adequate, with decent sizes and organic furnishings the norm.

There are some notable exceptions, though. The solitary elephant has a small, barren yard straight out of the 1960s. I don't know how old she is but I'm guessing she's getting on, and when she dies she shouldn't be replaced in this exhibit. At a stretch it might be ok for a surplus black rhino instead. A capybara yard doesn't meet the species' needs as it has only two tiny backyard wading pools of water - neither individual would be able to immerse themselves.

There's a disappointing gibbon island - just a few bare, thin branches with ropes between them, giving the gibbons a theoretical option to brachiate but no incentive to do so. Worst of all, however - partly because it appears to be quite new - is a barren, concrete, pair of tiny cages for a small group of chimps. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe it's a legacy from a bygone era and has simply been recently renovated - but if it's a recent addition it's a considerable failure both of ambition and realisation. I'd consider them parsimonious even for gibbons, let alone chimps.

That's the disappointing stuff out of the way, then. Let me talk about the good bit. As mentioned, the zoo is currently growing into the heavily-forested hill behind it. Work continues and several enclosures are shown on the map as under construction, including for moose and vultures, but a couple of new-ish exhibits are open for alpine ibex and lynx. The ibex exhibit is pretty good, but the lynx enclosure is something else entirely.

I'm going to draw a distinction between 'exhibit' and 'enclosure' here, because it's important. Ljubljana's lynx enclosure has some limitations as an exhibit: it's up a very steep, 20% gradient on unsealed paths, so it's effectively off-limits to anybody with mobility issues. And there's only one vantage point into a large enclosure. As I approached I was skeptical about my chances of spotting a lynx, only to be outdone by not one but two small children who saw different individual cats before I did.

I've always felt that small cats get massively short-changed in zoos. Given the opportunity they would use all the space that big cats get, but they tend to be consigned to tiny cages more suitable for squirrel monkeys. Not here. Ljubljana has taken the direct, discount route to excellence by taking a big chunk of native forest - at least two, perhaps even three standard tiger exhibits worth - and put a fence around it. The land has a ravine with a natural water course running through it, and felled logs provide a path across it for the cats. If they wanted to they could disappear in the undergrowth and never be seen, and I suspect in a smaller exhibit, with closer proximity to visitors, that's exactly what they would do.

There are big, mature trees that the cats have full access to, with wooden platforms metres up in the air: one of the cats was using one, while the other was spotted walking in and out of the sunlight between the trees - from a distance of perhaps 25m, I guess, from the viewing platform. I'm never likely to see a lynx in the wild, but if I do I imagine it would be an almost identical sighting. Is there higher praise for an animal enclosure than that? It's the best cat habitat I've ever seen in a zoo.

 

It is a delight to sign onto the ZooChat website and immediately be greeted by a trio of reviews by a wonderful traveler. I actually prefer to read about relatively obscure zoos as the elite members of the zoological world are usually well-covered by other zoo enthusiasts. I'd never heard of Dubrovnik Aquarium, I had no idea that Zagreb Zoo had such an amazing reptile collection, and Ljublana sounds as if it is well worth visiting. Thanks again for posting trip updates!

The lynx habitat at Ljublana Zoo reminds me of a similar exhibit at Wildlife Prairie Park in the state of Illinois. That rather obscure American zoo has enormous exhibits for lynx, bobcats and pumas and here is a photo of only a portion of the lynx exhibit:

Canada Lynx Exhibit (cat is near the bottom-right corner) | ZooChat

 

Thanks for the updates. Depending on where you will go next, you might see more of such lynx exhibits, they are quite common in in German "wildparks", but several larger zoos like Nurnberg, Bern and Dortmund also have them. The enclosure in Dortmund is larger btw then the one in Ljubljana .

 

Whether the bushmaster snake and tentacled snake, were on exhibit in Zagreb zoo, CGSwans? Did you saw them?

 

Most penalty rates don't kick in for evening work until 9PM though, depending on the award. If full-timers were obliged to work more than 38 hours they would incur overtime, but that shouldn't happen.

 

Didn't see a bushmaster. Can't recall either way with the tentacled snake.

 

Zoo #29: Prague Zoo, 20/06/2017

Wow.

I visited Prague Zoo on my third day in Czechia - it's now the official short-form English name, so it seems disrespectful not to use it, however weird it sounds - which also happened to be the milestone 100th day of the trip. Day one was a wipeout due to the exhaustion I described in Ljubljana, and I spent my second day in and around the old city centre: wherever possible I like to get a feel for a city before hitting the zoo. In the course of my explorations I got my first hint at the strength of the zoo culture in this country, when I went into a post office and noticed a set of stamps for sale: they were zoo stamps, with Prague, Jihlava, Dvur Kralove and I think Olomouc (or maybe Ostrava) represented. How on earth did they miss Plzen?

I had a poor night's sleep, ending with me being awake far too early in the morning, but at least that meant I was out and about in time to be at the zoo at opening time for once. I thought that might have given me a piece of the zoo to myself for the first 20 minutes or so, but no: this place is booming, and I was only about 10th in line for tickets despite arriving 10 minutes early. When I was lining up I noticed that they sell tickets for dogs, and there are water bowls around the zoo for them as well. I think we can all agree, can't we, that admitting dogs is something that separates the truly great zoos from the merely good?

My two previous visits to truly elite zoos on this trip - Zurich and Vienna - unfolded in very different ways. Zurich knocked me out from the moment I arrived, and apart from the occasional blemish (most notably the ape house), I didn't get back up off the mat. Vienna underwhelmed at first, but kept growing in my esteem as the day progressed, so that by the time I left it was secure in its place as one of the best zoos I've visited. Prague was a similar experience to Vienna, with a similar end result.

I started out by climbing the hill - I wasn't even aware that the zoo was bisected by a cliff, so wasn't quite prepared for it to be such a cardio workout - and began with the Indonesian tropical house. There's nothing particularly wrong with it - it's just a standard, 1980s-ish tropical House, but it was underwhelming, and for a while I thought the orangutans only had an indoor exhibit, so I was unimpressed by that until I found out I was wrong. Also nearby, and also contributing to my sense of disappointment, was the small and badly antiquated polar bear exhibit.

Continuing along the ridge line, the row of aviaries for lories and other small parrots are very attractive - I love it when a zoo can pull off planted aviaries for parrots - but while the species line-up was fantastic, with several I'm quite sure I'd never seen before, I was disappointed to find that most appeared to hold just a single bird. Lories and lorikeets are mostly social: it's important to keep them as such. The black lory was being a bit of an attention seeker, so I lingered a while and played tug of war with it for ownership of the arm of my sunglasses. I won, but only just.

A series of stock-standard small yards for macropods and Australian ratites left me unmoved, understandably enough, and it was only when I found my way to the African house complex that my opinion of Prague started to climb. The exhibit standard here is good without being great, but the collection is excellent and I saw my first bushbabies of the trip: the big troop of Senegals were impossible to miss, though I did strike out on the Moholis. I caught just the briefest flash of gray mouse lemur tail, but enough to claim it, albeit cheekily, for Zoochat challenge purposes.

Pretty much all the rest of the upper half of the zoo is made up of open enclosures for big mammals: usually much of a muchness, but I was thrilled to see grass in the elephants' yard. The big open savannah for seven or eight species is fantastic, but let down by only having a single viewing platform at one end. Most of the antelope species, as well as the pelicans, were down the far end. I note from the map that a new gorilla exhibit is being built at that end, and hopefully a path circumnavigating the savannah forms part of that project. Mind you, it's far from clear to me why gorillas, and not polar bears, are first in line for an upgrade. And as a further aside, the omission of rhinos in an otherwise fairly complete line-up of ABCs was astonishing.

Making my way down the hill, then, I was by this time debating not whether Prague would make it into my upper tier, but where. I was still a touch unsatisfied, though, with what felt like an overly mammal-centric collection: this wasn't what my research and Prague's reputation had prepared me for, and I'd expected to find a steady stream of small aviaries hither and thither.

I promptly found them all, of course. On the map the entire area is labelled as 'laughing-thrushes', which I thought was weird: if you're going to go with a specific species, as opposed to something generic like 'birds' or 'aviaries', is it really the laughing-thrush that you choose? But apparently so, and as I made my way around I began to understand: Prague Zoo never saw a laughing-thrush it didn't like. The place is awash with laughing-thrushes. Or at least the signs told me as much: I had very mixed luck with finding many of them. A big blow to my Zoochat Challenge ambitions.

Just as I did at the zoo itself, I'm going to speed up through this half of the zoo. That was certainly unfair of me, but the afternoon was touching 34 degrees, and that's uncomfortable even for this heat-hardened Antipodean. More to the point, I'd already been at the zoo for five hours, and with my terrible night's sleep I was getting tired. But aside from the cat house, which has some wonderful terraria but badly outdated, all-indoors bathrooms for small cars, this lower half of the zoo has some truly world-standard exhibits.

I tend to come down on the 'cage' side of the cage vs island debate for monkeys, but the big primate islands here have fully accessible, mature trees that cancel out my usual criticism, that islands are too lacking in climbing opportunities. I loved the Chinese giant salamander house, complete with audio excerpts from a book I've never heard of, but that appeared to be some sort of allegory about a war with newts? Odd, but certainly entertaining. And the best of the best down here was the series of hoofstock (and Barbary macaque) clffside exhibits. These are as much a triumph of the strategy of using your environment to best advantage as Ljubljana's lynx exhibit from a few days earlier.

I'm not - yet - satisfied with where exactly Prague fits into my pecking order. But as I was walking about I realised that it reminds me strongly of San Diego, with the same varied topography, sprawling size, encyclopaedic collection and very high, albeit inconsistent, exhibit quality. And if you're being compared to San Diego you know you must be doing something right.

 

That would be War with the Newts by Karel Capek (the Czech author credited with originating the word 'robot') - a book I've started a few times but have still yet to complete, generally simply through forgetting to pick it back up when I get back from holiday. It does indeed tell an allegorical tale of a conflict between humans and intelligent Andrias, based on the extinct form A. scheuchzeri, and named as such.

 

We might just have to see what happens. The trip is still (relatively) young. I'm glad to hear you didn't melt in the heat. There were two young Scots at my hostel who were struggling badly enough in Prague, but have since moved onto Vienna where it is apparently going to be 37 tomorrow. I fear for them.

 

What is the reasoning behind admitting dogs? I have never heard of a zoo that allows that (except service dogs) and I can think of several reasons why that's not a good idea, but can't think of one reason why it would be.

 

An interesting cultural difference shared between the UK and US, it would seem; every zoo that I have been to forbids all pets beyond service dogs. Reasons cited include: potential to upset/harass animals (not that people can't...), potential to disrupt visitors, potential sanitation/health hazard if waste is not disposed of properly, and potential transfer of diseases between dogs and zoo canids.

 

With truly great zoos not accepting dogs I assume . Most dogs would surely be fit to walk around in a zoo, but it is their owners who are too stupid most of the times, thinking it is fun to tease animals with a barking dog....

With the problem that is was built in 2004......

I don't think so, most aviaries have off-show parts you can't see and I am quite sure that half of each pair was sitting just there or in the nest box

Except if you are a small mammal, giving jirds an enclosure of 50 square centimeters is not really good and a squirrel on less than 4 square meters neither...

Good to see you like Prague, which also easily made it within my top-10 and if not for the cat house, indonesian jungle and parts of the Africa house, it could be even higher...

 

I believe that this is due to fears that, should the zoo flood again, the location of the current gorilla enclosure is especially at risk....

 

I was perhaps going on a little fishing expedition with the dogs comment,

I don't think so with the lories. You can see into the indoor sections, and I looked closely for indications there were other birds in each aviary, It seems quite a coincidence if one bird was visible and the other not in four consecutive aviaries.

The Indonesian house is doubly disappointing now I know it's that recent,

 

Zoo #30: Plzen Zoo, 22/06/2017

An exhausting, painful, expensive, humbling and very satisfying day.

Exhausting for two reasons. One is obviously that the zoo is very big - not Prague big, but it must be close - and built on the side of a hill, so it's physically taxing. And it was exhausting because I'd had not quite enough sleep, nor quite enough organisational skill. It was painful for a prosaic enough reason: I bought new shoes in Prague, but when you're living out of a backpack it's not all that easy to wear them in gently. After rather too much running about in the morning I developed bad blisters on both feet, and ended up hobbling around the zoo like a 70 year old man waiting for a knee replacement.

Expensive because, unlike most zoos, I did do a *little* bit of thread-trawling for this one. I knew that Plzen staff are very welcoming of we here nerds, and also that you can see the nocturnal exhibits with the lights on if you arrive at the crack of dawn (err... or dusk, I suppose, in a sense). And if I were to succeed in getting a backstage pass I wasn't at all sure how long the zoo as a whole would take. I'd been planning to use Prague as a long-range base, but from hostel bed to zoo gate was going to take two and a half hours: there was no way I wanted to be leaving at 5:30, so I made a belated decision to decamp to Plzen the night before, and paid the equivalent of €28 for one of the worst hotels I've ever stayed in, all while I had a very comfortable hostel already paid for back in Prague. The wifi worked on a part-time basis, and the mattress was thinner than a supermodel with hyperthyroidism. Urgh.

At least I managed to get out of the hotel and up to the zoo in time for the opening. Having caught the tram I was advised to take by the hotel staff member, I got off at the right stop and followed the signs I found scattered through the park to the zoo.. Arriving at about 7:54, the staff member present used sign language to indicate that she wasn't opening until 8. I knew this already: I only wanted to buy my ticket to get down to the nocturnal house, but she wouldn't countenance such a flagrant breach of protocol. There was a digital clock counting down the seconds, and when I stood at the window, cash in hand, she pointed to the clock, which read 07:59:44. Only after it had ticked past 8 would she take my money.

Very well. I took the ticket and raced through the gate, scanning the map as I went. The nocturnal house was supposed to be near the entrance, but I couldn't find it anywhere. It was the African something-or-other... oh. There it is. On the other side of the zoo. Near the main entrance, which was not the one the signs scattered through the park had directed me to. Wonderful, but there was nothing else for it: I raced down the hill, noting along the way that there were many aviaries up on the hill that I felt sure would be a rich vein of passerines just waiting to be mined.

I was on track to be at this nocturnal house around 8:10, but then I got lost. I was ok until I got to the Mediterranean house, but after that I couldn't find my way there at all. I followed one path up a hill that took me into the European Mountains, but that didn't seem right so I back-tracked, then kept tracking until I landed in Madagascar. I thought I was walking into a ring-tailed lemur-inhabited cul-de-sac, though (I didn't realise you could literally walk through this walk-through. Also how are the lemurs kept in?), so I retreated from Madagascar, only to find I was nowhere near the Mediterranean but had washed up in Australia.

Now there's a paragraph that will only ever make sense to a Zoochatter.

I eventually found my way to Africa before night fell, and spent a pleasant ten minutes with a surprisingly active posse of small African mammals. And I damn-near got the fright of my life when I looked up at one point, straight into the intently-watching face of a lion only a few centimetres away. Don't do that to me, Plzen.

Pleasant, but was it worth the fuss and bother? I don't think so in my case. The overnight in Plzen probably was, if only because it meant I got around the zoo with confidence that I would have time, but even that was probably unnecessary: I just couldn't know that in advance.

And last but not least, humbling.

Humbling because I received far too much of a busy man's time. I only emailed Tomas two days before I planned to visit (I shall stick to his first name, but I suspect many readers know very well who he is). I thought it likely that I'd missed my window, but Tomas answered that day, and told me to come find him in the admin building. Excellent, except that you can't access the admin building from the zoo grounds, or at least couldn't on the day I visited: there was a concert busily being prepared for in the amphitheatre, which looked like the only plausible route on the map. Nor did I have the option of seeking a pass-out because, in my haste to get from the Asian garden to the Mediterranean to the European mountains to Madagascar to Australia and finally Africa, I'd lost my damned ticket.

I went to the main gate - the one I should have been at in the first place - and sought, without much hope, to explain my dilemma. But to my surprise and delight, the woman working there simply said 'sure, I'll call Tomas and let him know you're here'. And so she did, and Tomas promptly resolved the ticket issue by coming and meeting me at the gate instead, and personally taking me to the birds and small mammals off-show building.

I'd grabbed Tomas's name from somebody on here, and hadn't a clue who he was, so I was surprised and thrilled to learn that he is the curator for both species groups. I was even more surprised and thrilled when, rather than letting me in and leaving me to fend for myself, he stuck with me and spent the next 20 minutes giving a guided tour, identifying the various species (he quickly cottoned on, I think, that I am much less knowledgeable than most of you smart alecs and barely know my hutias from my hoopoes).

Along the way we chatted about how it is that Plzen came to have a collection so unique in its breadth and depth. In my ignorance I had assumed it was a legacy, that Plzen had always had so many species. I may have also tacitly assumed that entropy will win out, and that the collection will gradually thin out. The latter might be true one day, but when Tomas became curator they had two species of rodent, and the bird collection is literally his collection, or at least was: he donated his private collection of more than 100 endangered, mostly insular bird species to the zoo 17 years ago.

I told him there should be a Zookeepers Hall of Fame, and that he should be in it. He no doubt took it as flattery but I think it's true. It's because of his leadership that Plzen - a mid-sized zoo in a mid-sized city in a mid-sized country - is playing a bigger role in breeding endangered species than perhaps half the zoos in Europe combined. Perhaps Zagreb could name a path after him.

Tomas eventually had to leave, but left me to my own devices in the bird room, where I spent another 20 minutes or so checking out many species I've never seen before and may not see again. It's a wonderful collection, and I only wish more of them could be out on display, in lovely big planted aviaries like those at the top of the zoo. Speaking of which, my strike rate with passerines was absolutely abysmal, perhaps because of the heat. I haven't sat down to tally them up yet, but I fear that between bad runs at Prague and Plzen I am dozens behind where I needed to be after this week. Ho hum.

I could start to turn this post into one of my more typical sets of random observations. I could talk about the spectacular, massive bear exhibit that is probably the best I've seen despite having too much hot wire. I could praise the wonderful reptile collection, and especially the venomous snakes (taipans, spitting cobras, mambas and king cobras: these guys aren't messing around). I could mention that the underground exhibit, built into a World War II anti-aircraft bunker, is one of the most innovative and unique exhibits I've seen anywhere. But I think I've told a satisfying enough story as it is.