CGSwans flies north for the winter

Loved the reviews from Germany CGSwans but now I'm guessing there's only three countries left for this epic trip. Some bloody good zoos still to come though...

 

Three? What might they be?

 

At a guess I am going to say The Netherlands, The UK and Ireland. Maybe Jersey as well but I don't know how much of a pilgrimage you're willing to make this far in...

 

That would be quite the pilgrimage, but alas I only have a month left. The AFL Grand Final is on the last Saturday in September, and the Swans are showing dangerous signs of costing me a lot of money. My flight home lands at 11PM the day before the game: if we make it I'll need a caffeine drip to get me through it.

I have no comment to make on the subject of European geography.

 

The reptile section is indeed one of the best in Europe and they have an enormous collection (with good breeding results), of which a substantial part is off-show. Fortunately they regularly rotate, so at every of my 4 visits to Cologne I have been able to see species I have never seen before (and in some cases also never since...)

The apes in Cologne are normally free to choose between indoors and outdoors, but they have a tendency to stay indoors.

Yep only the one left.

Didn't you know Cologne has Asian desert elephants


Have fun in the Netherlands

 

Zoo #52: Burgers Zoo, 28/08/2017

Well, damn.

Big cats. Bears. Apes. Savannah. Rainforest house. Rinse and repeat.

One conclusion I’ve been building towards is that we nerds invent more distinctions between zoos than there really are. A tiger exhibit might be bigger or smaller, greener or barer, tasteful or temple, but it is still essentially a tiger exhibit, and all tiger exhibits are essentially the same, at least once basic hurdle requirements for animal welfare have been met. Tiger exhibits are a trope, something that is expected to have certain characteristics as part of a wider genre – zoos – that are expected to have certain characteristics.

Expand the idea out, and there’s really no need for a trip like this one. I’ve been to over 50 zoos now since March, but I’d really only recommend about 20 or so that have particular features that make them worth specifically travelling to a place for. That isn’t necessarily the same as the ‘best 20 or so’ – Helsinki certainly isn’t in the best 20 or so, but if you only wanted to go to one zoo during a trip around Scandinavia, I’d recommend it over the objectively superior Copenhagen. One stays strictly within the standard tropes for the zoo genre, and the other doesn’t. One is truly interesting in a way that the other simply isn’t.

Then you get to a place like Burgers. It doesn’t seek to upend or subvert any tropes either. The raw ingredients of a standard, European zoo are all here: big cats, bears, apes, a Savannah, a rainforest house. It’s just that it takes these tropes and pulls them together to produce as near to perfect an example of the zoo genre as can reasonably be asked for.

After entering the zoo – I arrived just a little past 11 – I promptly got lost, and stayed lost for quite some time. I later realised that I’d been following the main arterial path through the centre of the zoo, which apart from a sideways glance at the elephants doesn’t actually have any animals to see. I’d been looking for the Bush, but when I found one of the two zones labelled ‘Park’ I settled for doing it first instead. I assume the ‘park’ zones are a kind way of saying ‘the leftover bits from before we decided to try to be the best zoo in the world’, though that’s probably unfair to the first exhibits I saw, for chimpanzees and gorillas. These exhibits, I learned from some historical signage elsewhere in the zoo, are over 40 years old. That puts them before Woodland Park, does it not? If so the latter has been stealing Burgers’ credit for bringing great ape exhibits into the modern world. Even after four decades they are stunning exhibits.

The rest of the enclosures in this iteration of the Park – let’s call it Park A – are nothing particularly special, and the row of bird aviaries is one of the few things in the zoo that is truly ordinary. Park B is patchy at best too, though the leopard exhibit was the third excellent ‘spotted big cat’ enclosure I’ve seen in successive zoos. More on Burgers’ big cats later. From Park A, though, I had spotted the new Mangrove exhibit. It’s basically just manatees and flutter-byes, though there were also some horseshoe crabs: I was much more interested in those most charismatic of crustaceans than the other invertebrates flying about in front of me. As a manatee enclosure, it’s the best I’ve seen in Europe, I think (Wroclaw a possible exception) with a huge surface area relative to the likes of Beauval and Nuremberg. It’s great if you want to look down on manatees from above, but as there’s only one sub-surface window, and the manatees were at the other end, people wanting underwater viewing will be disappointed more often than not, I imagine.

I was underwhelmed by the Desert – which has a substandard bobcat enclosure and an ugly, 100% mock rock platform for bighorn sheep – and I wasn’t quite as enthused by the Ocean as I expected, either. It purports to have a 750,000 litre reef tank, and I believe them but can only assume it means the reef area I actually saw is connected to the first big tropical tank you see after entering from the Bush (as an aside, it’s no wonder I had such trouble navigating: all these buildings are separate but connected by underground tunnels, so I never knew where I was when I went outside!). I’ve made my love for big reef tanks well-known, but I wonder if Burgers have perhaps sacrificed some outright quality for the sake of being the biggest. I’d much rather have Copenhagen or Hamburg’s tank instead. I was also disappointed by the schooling fish tank: such a tank really relies on having fish that can be counted on to school, but the species in there weren’t much interested in being educated. And the bioluminescent tank, though a cool idea, was utterly let down by being in an area with external lighting: put it behind a black curtain, for pity’s sake!

That leaves Bush, which after seeing Masoala and Gondwanaland is the last of the big three indoor jungles for this trip. It’s not as big as Gondwanaland, and the concept isn’t as compelling or well-realised as Masoala, but I think it’s my favourite anyway. I got lost in there, repeatedly, and at one point ended up on some narrow dirt path up near the roof. Given Masoala’s rather more controlled experience, Bush was the most immersive of the three for me. My only complaint – and it’s a big one but also easily fixed – was the lack of species ID boards to tell me what species I should be looking out for.

Alright, now I’ve got all my criticisms and partial disappointments out of the way, let’s flip the switch to rapturous acclaim, shall we? Because for all that it’s supposed to be the indoor exhibits that are the big drawcard here, the Savannah and Rimba sections are all – yes, every single exhibit – up there with the best of their kind that I’ve seen, and in at least one case there is no doubt whatsoever about its masterpiece status. I literally finished writing my Cologne post during a lunch break at the zoo, in which I said I hadn’t found any outstanding lion exhibits in Europe. Then I headed across to the Savannah, where I found an enormous, green, lightly wooded enclosure for lions that isn’t complicated – just a wire fence enclosing some woodland – but is all the more perfect for its simplicity. The quality is mirrored by the cheetah exhibit next door (currently home to no fewer than seven cheetahs) and the enormous, gorgeous tiger enclosure over in Rimba, which is so big I kept looking for hidden barriers that might indicate that it’s actually two separate areas. Burgers might just have the best three big cat exhibits I’ve seen on this trip. The carnivore tour de force is completed by a wonderful sun bear and binturong mixed enclosure: I saw the sun bears easily enough, but I think you’d have to be very lucky to spot the binties. Never mind: seeing the trio of bears using the space is enough.

Burgers has two of the very best mixed-species ungulate exhibits I’ve seen. The Savannah is an elongated, sprawling paddock in which what must be at least 30 large animals don’t look in the slightest bit crowded. When I went through the first time the five white rhinos were wallowing in the muddy pool directly in front of the ground-level viewing area. There were zebra foals sprinting back and forth in the background, running laps that must have been close to 100m in length. The giraffes were off in the distance. It’s not perfect: there’s an ugly electricity pylon in the background, but the zoo is hardly to blame for that. It’s a remarkable exhibit.

It’s matched by another mixed ungulate exhibit in Rimba, except wait, this isn’t a mixed ungulate exhibit. It’s a mixed ungulate and primate exhibit, with macaques and siamang. I’d first caught a glimpse of the siamangs from outside Rimba, on my way into the Mangrove, and was thrilled by the climbing opportunities they had. Then when I saw the exhibit properly I realised I’d only seen them in a small portion of their overall climbing space, and had several huge trees too. I dislike seeing gibbons on the ground and guess what? Burgers’ siamangs had meaningful climbing space… and they weren’t on the ground.

If you’d told me it would only be my second favourite gibbon exhibit, though, I’d have laughed in your face. Then I found the palatial cage for yellow-cheeked gibbons and dusky langurs. Forget gibbons and langurs: I reckon this would be the best orang exhibit I’ve seen in Europe if only it had orangs, but I don’t begrudge the gibbons and langurs. How could I? I watched a gibbon brachiate at incredible speed from one end of the cage and back, flying for metres at a time from branch to branch. I’m afraid it has done permanent damage to my gibbon-watching: having seen what a gibbon cage can be, without any largesse other than space, I’m not sure anything else will ever truly satisfy me.

I’m almost thankful that that’s where this review ends, and that Burgers isn’t as big a collection as, say, Munich, let alone Berlin. There is such a thing as having too much of a good thing, and I rather fear a Burgers with the lot would ruin my appetite.

 

I am glad you enjoyed my home zoo

That is basically right and I think you can assume that all enclosures in the "park" will be replaced except the ones for gorilla and chimp.

It is however interesting to see the changes that have already taken place in the other "park" part: formerly giraffe is now bongo, formerly hippo is now ringed seal, formerly tiger is now coati, formerly orangutan is now lemur and formerly elephant is now meerkat

The chimpanzee enclosure was indeed the first of it's kind, opened in 1971 and the first time any zoo tried to keep chimps in a group (it had been done on an army base in the US before). This is also where the now famous Frans de Waal started his career. The gorilla enclosure is younger (around 1985), but still better than many modern counterparts...

Interesting that you are underwhelmed by 2 of the most highly rated parts of the zoo .

The giant reef tank is the 3rd tank after entering. The first one is the lagune which extends on both parts of the visitors walkway and there is the moray eel tank before as well. The giant reef tank is easily separated by the lightning and the fact that the currents are much stronger.

There is a number of signs hidden in a small house next to the restaurant, but that is the only place with signage, it is better to use a thread in the Burgers Zoo section of the forum for that purpose

The binturongs are normally always sleeping in the top left area, though they are sometimes active on the ground (and demand the bear's respect )

The actual count should be about 70 , they have 20 zebra alone + 15-20 wildebeest, 15 giraffe, 6 rhino and some roan antelope, waterbuck and beisa oryx.

Only the trees on the right side can be used by the siamangs, the left is reserved for the macaques, which were chasing the siamangs to such an extent, they had to be separated.

Are they mixed again or did you see only one of the species outside?

 

The wildebeest and oryx were each confined to side paddocks for some reason.

I never saw both primate species at once, but there was a sign closing off their night quarters the first time I went around that claimed all the animals were in their on-show enclosure. So I'm not sure.

I have trouble imagining the tank space I saw was 75 cubic metres, but I could easily be wrong.

On a completely different note, I have posted Copenhagen and Berlin on my blog for those interested.

 

For the wildebeest it is birth season and the young ones are too easy prey for the always harassing zebra... The oryx are new, so they are still being gradually introduced .

 

Zoo #53, Artis, 1/09/2017

Is there a grander, more majestic, more over the top, perhaps edging towards self-important name in the zooniverse than ‘Artis Natura Magistra’? Surely not. It’s a shame, I think, because Artis is a decent zoo, but not one that quite lives up to its august name.

I hobbled my visit a little from the start by declining to pay the princely sum of €2 for a paper map. I’d been assured by the cashier that there were maps around the zoo itself, but something must have been lost in translation, because while there were direction boards – I could find my way towards elephants, penguins, lions and so on – there were no maps, and so I spent the entire four hour visit slightly fearful that I might miss something important. But, too late, I was through the gate, where I was immediately perplexed. A small, bare paddock housed a motley assortment of ungulates: Bactrian camels, Ankole cattle, a donkey, reindeer and a fifth species I’ve forgotten, perhaps alpacas? I assume the unifying feature was that they are all domestics, but there was no signage to that effect. It just looked over-crowded and, frankly, a little weird.

I turned left – I’d seen some bird aviaries, which tend to exert a magnetic force upon me – and my impression improved greatly. The rainforest walk-through is a refurb, I think of a former ape house, but it’s probably Artis’ best feature. Another motley assortment – this time various primates, a sloth, some fruit bats, tree shrews, various reptiles and allegedly a ground cuscus – but it works. I found everything that was sign-posted except for the tokay geckos, about which I was unfussed, and the alleged cuscus, about which I was somewhat more fussed but stoic in my disappointment. The volunteer on duty in the hall said she’d been standing guard in there for three years and had seen the cuscus once, so I mustn’t take it too hard. I did see one in Kraków at least.

I enjoyed the slightly antiquarian reptile house, too, though I was surprised to learn that the gharial exhibit is a recent job: the stand-off barrier and high glass wall collude with the sun to make viewing very difficult. I’ve mentioned in the past that I tend to take little notice of invertebrate exhibits, and I breezed through the insect house (another decent repurposing of a historic building), but I was quite impressed by the butterfly house, which is enormous and perhaps the best I’ve seen across Europe. And the Aquarium building isn’t much as far as aquaria go, but as a zoo museum it’s simply gorgeous.

As far as I can tell, from looking at the map, I did indeed find everything, though it was a close run thing. The small mammal house was the last significant exhibit I found, and while the exhibit quality overall is less than great – that slate stack thing for meerkats is weird, and so for that matter is the presence of meerkats in the gorilla enclosure – I spent a lot of time in there anyway. The reason for that was a potto: the moment I saw the sign on the enclosure I knew two things, that a) I had virtually no hope of a potto emerging before closing time and b) I was going to hang around there until closing time, just in case. No luck, alas.

It’s a very mixed bag outside. The lion exhibit is dreadfully small: they need to enclose it more fully, fill in the moat and by doubling the surface area make it only half as inadequate. There are some simple but fully functional enclosures – such as the wallabies, anoa and South American complex – but there’s nothing that truly stands out. I kept thinking, as I made my way about (careful to follow every path, in the absence of a map), that I didn’t understand what Artis is trying to be.

There’s the sensitively preserved historic buildings, mixed in with modernist missteps (that frankly weird jaguar exhibit) and contemporary flourishes like the elephant paddock. The latter mixed features I really like (the edge of the pool lapping at the side of the walkway) and features I really didn’t (the half-arsed stylised ‘rocks’). One thing I did love about the obviously quite new elephant area was how seamlessly the zoo fits into the setting of the canal behind it. But then you go and have a waterfall path underneath an oryx enclosure, and I just about give up.

Perhaps it’s a little further along in a quixotic, ambience-undermining attempt at modernisation that I warned Antwerp, all those months ago, to cease and desist from? Certainly Antwerp is the zoo Artis most reminds me of, and perhaps if I’d have visited in April, when a zoo like this was still a novelty, I might have liked it more. Seeing a potto would have helped, too.

 

London's pottos have always been showy for me, I wonder if you'll go there?
I actually didn't see any signage for Potto in the small mammal house, I wonder if they've been brought on show recently.
I was told the map was a two euro 'donation'. I like it little enough when a zoo only offers a guidebook with a map that you have to buy, I think paying for a basic map is just forcing a bad choice on the consumer.

 

Dunno. It's historic but not particularly highly rated these days. Is there much to do in London, the city? Don't really know much about the place.

Calling it a 'donation' is a sneaky sales trick. People find it much harder to decline to donate than they do to refuse an upsell offer.

 

He has been on show for years in the second enclosure to the left from the otters, but he prefers his hiding place a lot, so you need some luck seeing him...

The ground cuscus are normally easily visible as fur balls in one of the hiding houses on the wall, just like the night monkeys.

 

Thanks. Someone is not well-attuned to the Australian art of sarcasm.

 

Zoo #However many it is now, Apenheul, whenever it was that I went to Apenheul.

You know, it’s a good thing we’re getting to the end (just five more zoos are likely after this one), because I’m really struggling to write.

I used Amsterdam as my base out to Apenheul, and once upon a time I thought it might have served for Rhenen or Amersfoort as well, though neither eventually made the cut. If somebody were to come to the Netherlands for a zoo-specific trip, though, I think Utrecht would make a much better base: Rhenen, Arnhem, Amersfoort, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Apenheul are all within an hour’s train ride or less, and you don’t have to pay Amsterdam accommodation prices which, let me tell you, are bloody painful.

Anyway, I was heading to Apenheul from Amsterdam. I was feeling energetic, and not especially enamoured with paying €2.90 to catch a tram, so I decided to walk through the city from my hostel, near the Van Gogh Museum, all the way to the central station. About a 40 minute walk, but as long as you manage to avoid being hit by a bicycle Amsterdam’s a nice place to walk.

So too, it turns out, is Apeldoorn (is it a coincidence that an ape-centric zoo is located in Apeldoorn?). I’d intended to catch a bus, and Google Maps had told me I wanted the #2, except when I got there the #2 was nowhere to be found. And the station information desk was closed. For all I knew, the bus wasn’t running and I’d be sitting at the Apeldoorn train station all day. It’s a nice station, but it only has one species of primate and they’re pretty common, and so having come this far I really wanted to go to Apenheul. There was nothing else for it: I walked.

Between my hike through Amsterdam and my hike through Apeldoorn, then, I reckon I must have done about 7km before I even reached the front gate… or what I thought was the front gate, because once you’re there a sign breaks the news gently that you’re still half a kilometre away. 530m, to be exact. So I reckon I must have done about 7.53km before I even reached the front gate. Apenheul better be worth it, I grumbled.

It’s worth it.

It’s really worth it.

Really, really worth it.

Apenheul has one job – to exhibit primates – and having equipped myself with a ‘monkey-proof bag’, I headed in to see how they do it. I started with the squirrel monkey forest, and that’s almost as far as I got, because how does one drag oneself away from this exhibit? Squirrel monkeys browsing in the bushes, digging around in the undergrowth, leaping from one tree to the next, one following after the other. Squirrel monkeys, everywhere, in all directions. 59 of them! I asked a staff member. This was the greatest primate walk-through I’d ever seen, and clinches the argument for me that it’s the exhibit quality, not the species displayed, that separates the good from the truly great.

It almost didn’t hold the ‘best ever’ title for more than five minutes. The lemur walkthrough doesn’t have the sheer rambunctiousness of the squirrel monkeys – 24 ringtaileds and a smattering of others is a lot to take in, but it’s not 59 hyperactive squirrel monkeys – but the sheer quality of the space is remarkable. Again the lemurs have full access to tall trees, and undergrowth to disappear into. There’s even a lake in the middle!

The non-walk through, more traditional primate enclosures range from good to great, too. The howler monkeys near the squirrel monkeys have an island that I would rave about, as being nigh on a good as an island can be, except it gets lost among the quality surrounding it. The sifaka enclosure isn’t anything remarkable, but when you have spring-loaded sifakas hopping around does it really matter? And then there’s the gorillas, a magisterial giant of an enclosure, with the entire park literally rotating around it, with a baker’s dozen gorillas.

I was there at the right time for the gorilla presentation, and it unfolded as if it were scripted. A co-habiting monkey (perhaps a L’Hoest’s monkey? I forget) came across ‘the stage’ first, scurrying across like a warm-up act, before the gorillas began to assemble. The show started without the silverback in attendance, but no sooner did I understand the keeper was explaining away his absence than he lumbered into view from the top of the hill, to a burst of applause. The monkey, meanwhile, wasn’t content with his 15 seconds of fame, returning for a second cameo, a concerted but failed attempt to snatch a tomato from the hands of a gorilla. I admire his pluck.

The park does hit something of a lull half-way along, with an adequate orangutan complex that nevertheless doesn’t reach the heights that were by this point expected of it. And I wasn’t all that impressed with the macaque walk-through, which is more a ‘walk-past’. A walk-through exhibit doesn’t really work if there’s no incentive for the inhabitants to cross the path, which is the case here. I see what they were trying to do with the inclusion of Barbary sheep, meanwhile, but it seems half-hearted. Upon exiting this section you – oh, come now, this is ridiculous! You walk through an aviary for fugly bloody Waldrapp bin chickens. I swear there’s an EU law or something that must mandate their presence.

Another triumph of a gibbon exhibit – I might have seen the two best ones in the world, just a week apart, following Burgers – and another triumph of a walk-through, following Apenheul and Apenheul. This time it was for tamarins, marmosets and saki monkeys, and then there was another one, with a Hanuman langur intermission. A sublime simian symphony.

Apenheul has one job: to exhibit primates. And it does it to near perfection. The species list isn’t all that gripping, to be truthful, or even fully representative: sure they have the sifakas but imagine an Apenheul with proboscis monkeys, douc langurs, geladas, tarsiers and aye-ayes. I was mildly disappointed at the lack of prosimians other than the lemurs. But I’m reminded of the apocryphal tale of the POWs liberated at the end of World War II, who were so starving they ate whatever was given to the,, only to complain a week later that they’d had the same soup every night. Think not of what Apenheul isn’t, but what it is. A unique treasure.

 

Actually, Apenheul did have from 2011 to 2015 which they received from Singapore Zoo. They sent back their last individual (Bagik IIRC) to Singapore because the proboscis didn't do well in the zoo and died rapidly because of diet problems (as in most langurs) as I recall.

A really nice review as per usual and one of my favourite thread ever. I particularly love the Zoo Duisburg review although I've never been there.