That's a bang on review, and I think throws something I've been thinking myself into sharp focus: so much of European ZooChat content is produced by Brits who've got used to Chester's charms. It's all subjective of course, but I think Chester is right up there with the best of the best on the continent.
I have every intention of coming back, and will take you up on that then. Sorry I'm just a little shy, is all.
Fifteen years on (or more?) I think it's still the best thing there - the thing new visitors most often comment on, zoo nerd or otherwise! Great, simple exhibitry. I really don't like the chimp house - probably the only thing at Chester I actively avoid - it does not measure up to the outdoors at all. And another piece of Chester's late 90s/early 00s burst of solid development, as with the bats and jaguars. The two largest hornbill aviaries in there were originally the gorillas' indoor areas, so they were indeed built for rather a chunky mammal! Glad you enjoyed it - I'm so familiar with it that it becomes hard to compare it to other European zoos objectively, so seeing a review 'in context' is always fascinating!
No not the end , half of zoochat is impatiently waiting for a ton of rankings, because that's what life is all about
Just occurred to me - when did you visit? If it was the last week or so then I think you'd have only seen the indoor viewing area for the otters - the otter outdoor enclosure viewing is in the area fenced off for the penguin pool refurbishment and for a new Madagascar exhibit to be built.
Indeed, the outdoor exhibit is one of my favourites at Chester but if only seeing the indoors I can understand CGSwans B- rating.
Damnit, did I miss it by that little? I visited yesterday. It doesn't at all surprise me that it was 'only' an indoor exhibit that I saw. I mean, it'd surprise me anywhere else, but at Chester...
The (temporary) restrictions went into place about 2-3 weeks ago. As to what you missed in the otter enclosure: Giant Otter enclosure 031015 | ZooChat Inside the enclosure - giant otters | ZooChat 26/3/2017 Sign describing the set up of the Giant Otter enclosure | ZooChat It's the old sea lion pool - makes a fantastic exhibit when the otters are out and about.
Alright, I'm glad Lintworm has my glass because I need both hands free for presentations. I've thought a lot about how to wrap this thing up. At one stage I intended to do a full ranking, using a bespoke grading system (yes, yes, @sooty mangabey, I know, it's subjective) to try to iron out the creases of time. But it wouldn't have worked. Vicissitudes of weather, mood, exhibit closures and species no-shows make any such system based on a single visit too fallible to be worthwhile. And you need to throw in changing tastes, as well: after all, Dubai Underwater World was just a little over six months ago, but if you consider it within the chronology of my lifetime experience of zoos it's just at the half-way mark. So I'm going to do a couple of things. I *will* rank my top 15, or maybe even 20 zoos, but beyond that I think it becomes too hard to express why I think Helsinki is better than Ljubljana, or that Budapest is superior to Moscow, or whatever the case may be. I'm also going to post a round-up, 'trip in review' sort of thing, where I (very briefly) revisit what I said about each zoo, and if my perspective has changed at all since (the changing tastes thing). Before either of those two things, I'm going to build a fantasy zoo. There's only one Sheridan Award, but my Golden Swans™ will number in the dozens. I've made a list of what I think was the best of every 'standard' exhibit type - lions, gorillas, rainforest houses and so on. Some of them are for species that are so ubiquitous that it's difficult to imagine a major zoo not having them, such as meerkats. But because there are some wonderful exhibits for rarely kept species, and some that are simply unique, I've broken exhibits up into categories, and am allowing myself up to nine in each cagegory. The one rule is that two exhibits for the same primary species cannot both make the cut, which means some hard choices have been made. Zoos are asked to keep their acceptance speeches short: any director going longer than 45 seconds will be drowned out by piped-in animal sounds. Zoos are of course very welcome to display their Golden Swans™ awards outside the exhibit in question, but I'm afraid they'll have to buy their own trophies. I'll be posting Large Carnivores first.
This is a great idea and should be exciting to read. While some people criticize ranking zoos, at the end of the day it often seems as if any "Top Zoos" list includes the same old selections but just in a slightly different order. Therefore, it will be intriguing to find out where you place Vienna, or Berlin, or Rotterdam or even what appears to be one of your favourites in the form of Chester. I find it very easy to come up with a Top 5 or Top 10 USA zoo list and I find that even a Top 15 is pretty much ingrained in my head...but beyond that the choices are very difficult and not really worth contemplating.
Golden Swans, Part I: Large Carnivores I’ve allocated five of these nine spots to big cats, because most major European zoos have at least several species, and there are clear differences in needs across most of the species, though I have combined jaguars and leopards. Bears get three spots, again because many zoos have multiple species, the standard of bear exhibits across Europe is surprisingly high, and I want to reflect that strength. I approached that as ‘best three, for any given species’. Unfortunately that does mean choosing just one large canid exhibit, but that’s not too great a hardship. So let’s begin. The Golden Swan for Best Tiger Exhibit goes to… Burgers Zoo. It was at Burgers Zoo, and outside this exhibit specifically, that I first had the idea to summarise my trip in this way. This enclosure is, to be frank, a class above and beyond any other tiger exhibit I saw, with its immense size and gorgeous landscaping. There are some good tiger exhibits elsewhere, but this wasn’t a hard choice. The Golden Swan for Best Lion Exhibit goes to… Burgers Zoo. 2/2 for the biggest of the big cats. I’d criticised the overall standard of lion enclosures across Europe just before I saw this enormous, simple, but attractive chunk of forest. Before Burgers the best lion exhibit I saw was probably at Attica, of all places. After Burgers though we went on a run, with wonderful exhibits at Rotterdam, London, Edinburgh and Chester as well, and a case could be made for all of them. But Burgers is more tasteful than London, bigger than Rotterdam or Edinburgh and has superior viewing to Chester. A good win in a tough field. The Golden Swan for Best Jaguar/Leopard Exhibit goes to… Chester Zoo. Well, obviously. I spent much of the past few months decrying how poorly these spotted big cats get treated, being kept in dorm-sized enclosures for no good reason at all. Looking back, Barcelona was decent-ish, but Krefeld was the first one that really satisfied me, and then Cologne knocked it off the very next day. Cologne’s leopard exhibit was looking good until… well, until Chester stepped in and showed the Continent how it’s done. The Golden Swan for Best Snow Leopard Exhibit goes to… Zoo Zurich. No surprises here, I suspect, but the ones it had to fight off might be. Helsinki makes great use of its natural environment with a sloping, rocky and generously-sized cage, with the adjacent reindeer exhibit serving as The Food Channel for the cats, coaxing them down towards the front. It’s only Zurich’s higher ‘production values’ in the form of better viewing – Helsinki has a fully enclosed cage – that puts it in front. The other zoo Zurich had to hold off was, of all places, Bucharest. The snow leopards here have a truly enormous, fully enclosed cage that is the best Bucharest has to offer, but it’s quite apparent that it wasn’t designed with them in mind but has been repurposed from another species, probably tigers. It gets a very honourable mention, but Zurich has the best custom-designed snow leopard set-up I’ve seen, and I have to acknowledge technical mastery where I see it. The Golden Swan for Best Cheetah Exhibit goes to… Chester Zoo. A tight one, this. You could be forgiven for asking why Burgers’ lion exhibit takes out its award, whereas the carbon-copy cheetah one doesn’t. It was in the medal position right up until the final zoo of the trip, but I prefer Chester’s multiple viewing options, with glass windows and elevated viewing over the fence, and also that there’s a series of inter-connected exhibits that make for greater flexibility. I also suspect that Chester’s exhibit was designed for cheetahs, whereas Burgers looks like it might have been repurposed from tigers after the Rimba opened? Anyway, Nuremberg also did pretty well here, but was outclassed by the other two. And while I like the *idea* of mixing cheetahs with rhinos, as at Attica and Leipzig, I’m not sure it really works in practice. The Golden Swan for Best (Polar) Bear Exhibit goes to… Hanover Zoo. Easily. Copenhagen is good and Munich is a respectable second, but Hanover is a work of art. Sugary, syrupy art. The theming is almost too much to handle but the exhibits themselves make up for it, with deep pools constantly churning thanks to wave machines, and moderately spacious land areas with such luxuries as gradients and grass. This is one of the very few enclosures I’ve seen that does this majestic species justice. I’ll even take the crane if I have to. The Golden Swan for Best (Spectacled) Bear Exhibit goes to… Zoo Zurich. After. Hanover’s polar bears it becomes much tougher to pick just two. A case could be made that the next best pair are both for spectacled bears, at Zurich and Chester respectively. Two into one doesn’t go, however, and I’ve plumped for Zurich. Chester might even be bigger, I’m not sure, but Zurich is spacious anyway and it has enormous high treetops to reach into that I’m treating as a tie-breaker. The landscaping is divine, as an aside – Zurich is one of the few zoos that understand that mock rock is a garnish, not a main course. The Golden Swan for Best (Brown) Bear Exhibit goes to… Plzen Zoo. This third and final bear award is the hardest to give. It could have gone to sun bears, at Chester or Burgers. It could have found its way to Wroclaw’s brown bears instead of Plzen’s, and Munich would have been a sniff if it had been bigger too. Plzen wins though, admittedly partly because I actually saw the three bears, unlike at Wroclaw, and so I feel I saw the exhibit in action. This is probably one of the older enclosures to win a gong, and I wish it had less hotwire, but the usable portions of the exhibit are still wonderful, and it needs to be seen to be appreciated how sprawling it is: it almost runs the length of one side of the zoo. A great example of what can be achieved for a local species with nothing more than space and native vegetation. The Golden Swan for Best Canine Exhibit goes to… Berlin Tierpark. I think when I wrote up my visit here that I neglected to mention the enormous, attractive, moated wolf exhibit. The Tierpark is rightly noted for its hoofstock, but this enclosure for wolves proves they can deliver for carnivores too. At the time of my visit there were three hyperactive wolves sprinting back and forth, play-fighting in and out of the water and from one of the paddock to the other. It’s a sadly rare pleasure to see animals *run*. The Tierpark benefits from active animals in a huge setting, with unobtrusive viewing in the form of the moat. And it had to beat out some strong competition, with excellent wolf habitats at Munich, Bucharest and even Bratislava coming into consideration, though none are truly at Berlin’s level. The closest contender was probably Chester's African hunting dogs, but they didn't give me ten minutes of compelling canine action sequences. That’ll do for now. Chester, Zurich and Burgers have two each, and Plzen, Hanover and the Tierpark one.
Probably fair comment, as I feel the Chester one is very much informed by the (older) Zurich enclosure(s). I think the Zurich complex is probably a little larger, as well.
If you happen to visit Highland Wildlife Park on a future return trip to Europe I believe you will view their Polar Bear complex as immeasurably superior to Hannovers! Hannover does indeed have a good one though!
Originally (but that is talking about almost 50 years ago) it was a lion enclosure, as the safaripark had 3 lion enclosures back then, but it has been in use for cheetahs since a very long time now. Tigers were previously kept where the Desert is now and up to 2006 where the ring-tailed coati are now, but back then it was a tiger pit . The same goes for brown bears if Rhenen was visited , but the problem is that one can only see a limited amount of zoos and arguably CGSwans has visited almost all (Doue, Cabarceno and Pairi Daiza being the most notable exceptions) that play in the Champions league
Funny you should mention that. Three of the four that have been mentioned are all in the top ten zoos I wish I could have made it to, alongside Cotswold and Bristol (the latter being a choice, but made largely on the basis of lack of energy for the trip), Jersey, Wuppertal, Munster, Salzburg and Innsbruck. Pairi Daiza is the one I'm not all that fussed about.
The Golden Swans, Part II: Ungulates (and elephants) In which some familiar names appear again. There’s really only two essential categories here – elephants and an African Savannah. Beyond that, I’ve chosen some exhibits because they stand-out among enclosures for species with specific requirements, and some because of the sheer quality of the exhibit. The Golden Swan for best elephant exhibit goes to… Zoo Zurich. There were really only three in contention here: the two mega-developments, at Cologne and Zurich, and I considered Beauval as well, with its sprawling, grassy paddocks. I’m giving it to Zurich, though, in large part because it was such a pleasure to see something more than a concrete stall for the indoor quarters. That applies equally to Cologne, but Zurich is the more attractive exhibit, both inside than out. All three would be worthy additions to any zoo. The Golden Swan for best Savannah exhibit goes to… Burgers Zoo. Two savannahs (which I am defining as mixed-species African ungulate paddocks) stand out above the rest, Burgers and Prague. As good as Prague is, though, this wasn’t an especially tough choice, and largely because of something Prague could easily fix: the latter’s much inferior viewing opportunities. Prague was only visible from a platform at one end of the enormous paddock, and with most of the animals congregating at the far end it certainly puts the ‘ant’ in ‘antelope’. There are multiple views, both from a height and at waterhole level, into Burgers’ equally sizeable exhibit. And with the unfortunate, but unavoidable exception of the big electricity pylon, Burgers is also picture perfect. Throw in the fact that Burgers has a rhino crash – something I’m used to, coming from Werribee, but that seems rarely attempted in Europe – and it’s a clear winner. The Golden Swan for best camel exhibit goes to… Berlin Tierpark. Well, of course it does. I’m claiming both paddocks here – for dromedaries and Bactrians, because the combination is seamless and the two species are obviously complimentary. I had to walk all the way around just to satisfy myself that they were indeed separate exhibits. I’ve written earlier in this thread of my love for hahas as barriers for ungulate exhibits: they are so unobtrusive, and so simple yet effective. This is an exhibit for what amounts to a filler species, but it’s so aesthetically perfect that it is an automatic selection for one of my nine slots. The Golden Swan for best okapi exhibit goes to… Rotterdam Zoo. Most okapi exhibits aren’t especially imaginative: a (typically quite small) paddock under some tree cover and a set of stalls is it. Rotterdam, by contrast, gets creative. The indoor holding area is larger than most and the steaminess helps put the species into a tropical context that is rarely achieved for such a big species. And the outdoor exhibit doubles as an aviary: a great use of space. There wasn’t really a strong contender for this one, though I’d like to see Burgers try. The Golden Swan for best rhino exhibit goes to… Chester Zoo. Slightly cheeky, because white rhinos are already in this fantasy zoo to beat all fantasy zoos, but this is for black rhinos, and it’s not *too* uncommon for zoos to have more than one species. Nuremberg is dreadfully unlucky here, because I very nearly gave it to them for a spacious, attractive Indian rhino exhibit that manages to avoid being nothing more than a mudpit. But I simply can’t go past Chester’s enormous complex of several grassy, spacious yards. It’s what Chester’s elephant exhibit (which is what passes for a weakness at Chester) should be. The Golden Swan for best hippo exhibit goes to… Berlin Zoo. It. Has. Grass. That shouldn’t be the decisive factor that it is, but I kept banging on about wanting to see grass, and meaningful land spaces for hippos, and Berlin is one of the very few that delivers on both scores. Combine that with the easy viewing over low barriers, and a surprising – even unsettling – proximity to the hippos, and you have a great exhibit at a zoo where big mammal enclosures tend more towards being adequate than genuine stand-outs. Beauval is probably a runner up here, and I think I could have been impressed with Cologne had I not found the hippos shut outside without water access. The Golden Swan for best mountain bovid exhibit goes to… Prague Zoo. Obviously. This one’s an absolute triumph of that most satisfying of exhibit design approaches: using the natural landscape to best advantage. There are several near-vertical cliff face exhibits along the ridge that separates the zoo in two, and you can take any one of them to present this award to. Nothing else even gets remotely close. I’d hate to be the keepers tasked with rounding one of the goats up. The Golden Swan for best swine exhibit goes to… Chester Zoo. I was leaning towards skipping this category altogether. It is so rare to see a pig exhibit that isn’t simply a patch of mud, and it’s hard to single out one mud patch as better than another mud patch. Then I went to Chester, where they somehow manage to maintain greenery in with their babirusa, not once but twice. Although, I admit that I remain ever so slightly suspicious, since I didn’t actually see a barbirusa. I’m just taking it on trust that they are really there, living in their miraculously grassy enclosures. The Golden Swan for best deer exhibit goes to… Nuremberg Zoo. I forget the species, but it’s the long, lightly wooded one past the gorillas. This is the last one to make the cut, which is less a suggestion that it’s weaker than the rest (far from it) than because the others are largely for species with specialised requirements. The closest other contender for this spot was the very similar chamois paddock at Munich, and that’s testament to how taken I was with Bavaria’s picture perfect standard of ungulate paddocks. Both zoos manage to make aesthetic masterpieces out of exhibits that are unimaginative fillers in most other zoos. Nuremberg wins out mostly on size, but it’s also a recognition of just how well it does for ungulates across the zoo. That’ll do for today. Checking in with the running totals, we have: Chester – 4 Burgers and Zurich – 3 Tierpark – 2 Berlin Zoo, Hanover, Nuremberg, Plzen, Prague and Rotterdam - 1
