CGSwans flies north for the winter

CGSwans, I'm enjoying your trip and your updates. Since I've done some traveling in the same way you are, and have been to some of these same places, I have a few questions:
1. Did you go up to the observation deck of the Burj Khalifa? I certainly could not pass up the chance to go up the tallest building in the world!
2. When sleeping in youth hostels, I strongly recommend using sleeping pills. Without them, I would never get any sleep in a hostel, with all of the snoring!
3. You're not mentioning it, but are you taking in the animal shows in any of these zoos? The dolphin show at the Lisbon Zoo is the best I've ever seen, and Madrid's is almost as good.
4. Did you really have to skip Bioparc Valencia? That fairly new zoo is the most "natural" zoo I've ever seen! Exhibit quality is a 10 out of 10.
5. Funny that you say you "don't get it" about the appeal of koalas. Of course you don't, you are from Australia! You are simply taking them for granted. For North American (and I suspect European) small kids, koalas are among the cuddliest, cutest animals they can see in any zoo, and there are only a dozen or so American zoos that have them. So their appeal is well deserved.

 

Zoo #8 - Bioparc Valencia, Spain, 28/03/2017

This was my first experience of a new zoo that was built from the ground up and that hadn't been substantively changed since. Whilst I like the idea in principle of being able to build to a single design concept, the result left me underwhelmed.

I had allowed four hours here after leaving Oceanografic and before catching my train out of Valencia. Two could have been sufficient. Partly that's a function of the relatively small size of the collection and its moderately strong focus on ABCs, but I also find that I spend much less time at zoos with a couple of pre-defined routes through exhibits, whereas if I'm at a more randomly spaced collection I tend to take longer to work my way around. At Valencia it's easy to go from big mammal to big mammal and before you know it, you've seen the whole zoo.

With a couple of exceptions I wasn't overly impressed by what I found here. There were quite a few exhibits in which highly active and intelligent species had virtually nothing to do: the gorillas, chimpanzees and especially mandrills were notable cases of this, but it even extended into various ungulate exhibits. Pretty much the only enrichment activity I'm half-aware of for ungulates is the opportunity to graze or browse, but many of Valencia's hoofstock are in paddocks that don't even have dirt that could conceivably grow grass: they're on sand.

Most of the carnivore exhibits were on the small side, and one was downright scary. I don't know how well hyenas can jump but I felt unsafe looking at their enclosure, as I didn't think it would have taken too great a propulsive force to allow the solitary hyena there to reach me. I was probably imagining it, and I'm sure if there was a problem it would have emerged by now, but I moved on in a hurry anyway.

There were a couple of bright spots. By far the best exhibit was 'Madagascar', a meandering walk-through enclosure for about five different lemur species, with plenty of mature trees for them to climb in and browse from. Curiously, had I gone through here before 2PM I could have gone in on my own, but in the afternoon they switch to having hourly guided tours of the exhibit, so I had to return to it about 45 minutes after first trying to get in. Quite annoying, but once I was in the guide took no further notice of me and I basically roamed around at will. It's an excellent exhibit that is a cut above the rest of the zoo.

I also had a rare zoo visit where I lingered for a long time watching the elephants. It looked to me like most of the herd were young bulls - is this correct? Anyway the elephants had access to a large pool and I was lucky enough to watch for 10 minutes as two of them engaged in a rollicking water fight. Probably my favourite time ever spent watching elephants.

There's no reptile house here, as such, but there's a handful of exhibits scattered here and there and they are mostly very good. The bird collection is similarly modest, though I had the very strange experience of being Stuka-bombed by a pigeon in the walk-through aviary. This bird was coming straight at my head, and I'm convinced it would have kept coming if I hadn't ducked first. Pigeons 1, Swans 0. On the subject of birds, I saw a flock of vagrant nanday conures in the park outside the zoo, but I assume this must be a coincidence as I doubt Bioparc would ever have had a Neotropical parrot species. How common are parrots in European cities?

I have to confess that I left Bioparc a bit deflated. It's a better zoo than Madrid, but whilst it's better looking there is little sign for at least some species that they are anymore concerned with providing useful, stimulating spaces for their animals. As one of the youngest zoos on this trip they should also be one of the best. It's probably one of the prettiest, in a saccharine, empty calories sort of way. But there is nothing of substance here.

 

1. No, I didn't. I considered it but the air wasn't particularly clear and I didn't want to spend $40 or so on seeing pollution from the top rather than the bottom.
2. I have $80 ear plugs. They work like a charm.
3. I watched the dolphin one at Oceanografic, but not any of the others. They are pretty same-same-but-different after a while, at least to me.
4. Funny you should mention it. We obviously have very different conceptions of exhibit quality, though - although the lemur walk-through really is excellent.
5. I know how rare they are overseas, it's just that they're boring to see in person.

 

Zoo #9: Zoo Barcelona, Spain, 31/03/2017

I'll presage this by saying that I am ploughing through writer's block to try to get this post up, so if it reads as undercooked please forgive me. It's either that, or I just know from past experience that this thread will end here.

This is the last stop on the Iberian leg of the tour. Before coming here I'd eaten a meal at a vegan restaurant the night before and spotted a poster mentioning the Barcelona Zoo. Curious, I asked what it was about and between my non-existent Spanish and the waiter's scarce English we established that it was a petition for changes to the zoo - though not, apparently, for its closure - to make it more scientifically-focused and to improve animal welfare. I'm 100% on board with that, though I wasn't going to sign a petition I couldn't read. When I got to the zoo the next day I confess I couldn't really tell what they were on about. It's a surprisingly good zoo.

I arrived perhaps an hour after opening time - I have fallen inexorably into holiday mode, such that it's a good day when I manage to leave my hostel before 10 - and took about four hours to meander through the zoo in no particular order. It's a layout that lends itself to doing that, with lots of bits and pieces that I found myself having to turn back towards. It's a nice contrast with Valencia: as much as having a single pre-defined route makes good design sense, I am coming to the view that it makes for a poorer visitor experience.

On the way in I had seen some vagrant Quaker parrots - my second set of vagrant parrots in three days - though it seems certain that these are the result of escapes from the zoo as a) I didn't see them anywhere in Barcelona except the immediate vicinity of the zoo and b) I later saw ring-necked parakeets and a sign saying that no fewer than four parrot species frequent the zoo.

There are little bits and pieces of construction work going on everywhere, and the entire savannah section is apparently in the process of being replaced. Because this area houses the elephants, giraffes and hippos, though, it looks like the work is being done in stages and all of these species were still on display, with the development going on around them. The dolphin arena is closed and unless the aquarium only ever consisted of two tiny tanks then it's under redevelopment too. Quite a lot of enclosures are empty, although I'm not sure whether that's a direct consequence of the works or simply that then collection is down-sizing.

I recall seeing some division on a thread recently about the Barcelona reptile house, with somebody saying that it had nice species but sub-standard exhibits. Again, I'm not sure I can see the problem; what I found was a series of excellent, attractive enclosures that were of a great size for everything except two Komodo dragons, which do urgently need bigger accommodation. The most notable species for me was the Nile soft-shelled turtle, which Zootierliste tells me are also at Valencia, though I didn't see any there.

I almost missed out on the bird house, which I overlooked on the map until I was heading towards the exit. This would have been a terrible mistake as it is or of the better features of the zoo - though it's not of the same quality as the Bronx, which remains the best-in-class for this type of exhibit that I have seen. The flaw here might be that the exhibits are all variations on the same theme: tropical rainforest aviaries. Nevertheless, this building was also important as it netted me about ten passerines for the Zoochat challenge, my single greatest haul, though I think we're all playing for second after Vision. I shall endeavour to bring my counts for both that and the primate challenge up to date to reflect my Spanish swing.

Most of the rest of the zoo is serviceable, but non-descript. I liked what I took to be a massive outdoor enclosure for callitrichids, though from what I could tell only one of the half-dozen or so groups had access to it, with the rest confined to rather more modest night quarters (still viewable by the public). I assume access is rotated, but the only golden-headed tamarin I saw actually outside was still sticking close to the night quarters, where the rest of its group were. I wonder, can callitrichids in breeding situations be mixed readily? If not the outdoor section should perhaps be sectioned off to provide more regular access to each species - it would still be an excellent set of exhibits. The other primate exhibits are much more modest, with a series of small-ish open exhibits for great apes and a row of cages for old world monkeys (and howler monkeys). I don't really have much to contribute on carnivore exhibits.

On the whole, I think Barcelona pips Lisbon as the best zoo I've been to thus far, but I am conscious that I haven't quite hit any of the big name traditional zoos of Europe yet (though I have probably been to its two best aquaria). That'll change fairly soon.

 

Quite a few European cities have parrot populations derived from escapes - indeed most of the southern half of England has been colonised by Ring-necked Parakeets (Regent's Park and Barnes wetland centre are both good spots for them). The Quaker Parakeets in Barcelona are particularly common around the zoo but they do occur all over the city.

Most of the more... dubious of Barcelona's exhibits have been improved since I was last there - I was always fond of it (having visited on four separate occasions due to the quality of the city, rather than the zoo) but I suspect it's much better now than I've ever seen it.

I also found Bioparc Valencia a little lightweight - I think a lot of a person's opinion of it depends on how much they value the aesthetics of the exhibits. It's not a bad place, but a few exhibits are a little small for my tastes.

 

It wasn't just size that bothered me, but emptiness. There's simply nothing there for some animals to do.

I wasn't shocked by the quakers - it was easy to imagine how they might have been established. The nanday conures in Valencia caught me by surprise though.

 

Thanks for that.

So I'm a vagrant swan in Europe but the quaker parrots aren't. I can live with that.

 

Not a zoo, but on Monday I made a visit to the Parc Ornithologique in the Camargue, in France. I'm not really one who goes traipsing through swamps in search of animals in the wild (I leave this to my rather more physically robust fellow Antipodeans) but wild flamingoes were only a bus ride from Arles away, so I couldn't resist.

The Parc is a paid attraction (€7 I think) and some might argue it is a 'zoo' as a) there are captive birds on display and b) the flamingoes were being fed. I was slightly disappointed to spot the latter just before closing time as it did undermine the magic of seeing them in the wild, but they are still free to come and go if they please. They're just made an offer to good to refuse.

There were only three aviaries, all for non-releasable rehab birds (from memory a white stork, two adult Eurasian eagle-owls which had a chick and a black kite). It doesn't pass my completely arbitrary and non-scientific test of whether a place has sufficient scale to be called a zoo.

The flamingoes are the drawcard here, obviously. There are maybe a thousand or so in the colony and they're clearly accustomed enough to humans that they'll let you get within a couple of metres if they are close to the banks. There are a lot of other birds as well - I remember seeing cattle egrets, grey herons, mallard ducks, yellow-footed and black-headed gulls, Eurasian coots, moorhens and pied avocets. I'm sure there are many others that come and go. I also saw a European otter, which was exciting.

I didn't go around the full circuit of the park as I was conscious of time, but I did go to a bird hide to look out over the much larger lake that I didn't circum-navigate. This must be the one they don't feed from because it was almost devoid of birds.

I had changed into shorts after arriving as it was quite hot there, but I quickly chose to be over-heated rather than eaten alive by insects. I also had an anxious half hour or so when what I thought was the second last bus didn't show. I didn't realise the bus I wanted only runs in summer for some unknown reason. I wasn't relishing the thought of being stuck in the Camargue overnight. A twitcher I am not.

 

*did

I hate how little time we get to edit posts. In cases like this it means I'm unable to fix an autocorrect that completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

 

Yep, and the edit button was gone.

 

I think it might be that I lose editing privileges once somebody likes the comment. Like this - but not the previous post - so I can test the hypothesis.

 

You can still edit after a 'like', but I agree it's too short in general.

 

Hmm. That's not it, as Funky says.

And yes.

 

I just want to say that I am really enjoying this thread CGSwans and I love not knowing where you're off to next!

Also agree that the edit function is pretty annoying now, especially when you notice a typo just hours after posting.

 

Glad to read it's still alive and has grown. The last time I was there the sunfish was still relatively small.

 

I always find it fascinating when zoo enthusiasts write down how long they spend in a zoo as there is always a wide range of possibilities. When I've been on a solo zoo trip there are times when I venture into a fairly small American zoo and see every exhibit, take a photo of every animal sign and all of the enclosures from various angles...and yet after an hour-and-a-half I'm done and headed for the exit door. Many small USA zoos can easily be seen in 1-2 hours, the moderately-sized zoos are 3-4 hours and then the big guns (San Diego, Omaha, Saint Louis, Columbus, Bronx, etc.) take up a full day.

However, all touring times are fluid and dependent on a variety of factors. When my wife and I drive south to Seattle to visit Woodland Park Zoo we sometimes spend 5 hours there and only see 30% of the entire zoo! Our 4 young kids are too busy with lunch, playgrounds, the carousel, looking at wild squirrels, etc. @CGSwans really enjoyed Lisbon Zoo and Barcelona Zoo and he spent 4 hours at each one, although other ZooChatters have spent 7 hours at each of those respective zoos. I don't believe that I'm ever critical of how long an individual spends at a particular zoo as we all move at different speeds.

Length of zoo visits of our intrepid explorer:

Dubai Aquarium: 2 hours
Al Ain Zoo: 4 hours
Aquario Vasco da Gama: 45 minutes
Lisbon Zoo: 4 hours
Lisbon Oceanarium: 2 hours
Madrid Zoo: 3 hours
Oceanografic: 3.5 hours
Bioparc Valencia: 2 hours
Barcelona Zoo: 4 hours