CGSwans flies north for the winter

Sounds rather how I felt about the Bronx. An objectively wonderful Zoo that I couldn't warm to.

Perhaps Basel's quirkiness failed to shine through for me because it came relatively close on the heels of Antwerp, which I loved for its oddities and imperfections. I've already realised that how certain zoos fall in the order of my itinerary could significantly affect how I perceive them.

 

Another great write-up
Are you keeping a mental ranking of individual exhibits? It would be nice to know how the bear enclosure compares to Chester and Frankfurt, both of which I hope you visit your own sake.
It's interesting to hear that Melbourne's elephant enclosure is rather small; I visited in 2012 before I really knew I was "into" zoos and thought it was really good. Time for a return trip

 

Sorry. I missed this. Not in anything that would resemble a systematic way, no.

Melbourne's is better than Taronga's, but I think both were out of date before they were even finished, unfortunately.

 

Zoo #17: Genoa Aquarium, 21/4/2017

I'm finding that one of the difficulties with this thread is that for every zoo where a post writes itself - Lisbon, Oceanografic, Beauval, Antwerp and Zurich - there are others where the zoo was non-descript, the visit unremarkable. It makes it hard to achieve a consistent style or standard when sometimes you're scratching around for stuff to write about. And it's dangerous when you're also prone to crippling attacks of writer's block, which I am, and which is similarly holding up my other holiday writing project as well.

But. This post is already five days late, and Genoa will only continue to become a vaguer, hazier memory the longer I delay. More importantly, I'm due for visit #18 tomorrow and I don't want to fall too far behind, or I won't finish what I've started. So Genoa, then: an aquarium that won't quite get the treatment in this thread that it deserves, but an unsatisfactory post is hopefully better than none at all.

Genoa completes my trifecta of Europe's big three aquaria, as the oldest - but also the least - of the three. That's praising with very faint damnation, of course, since Lisbon and Valencia are both so exceptional, whereas Genoa is for the most part a standard public aquarium, if a bit larger than the average.

The big crowd pleasers here are a mix of the usuals - dolphins, penguins, sharks, harbour seals - the slightly less usual manatees and the decidedly unusual longcomn sawfish. Sawfish! I saw an Australian freshwater sawfish at the very first aquarium I ever visited as a ten year old, in Canberra, before it closed and later re-opened as the National Zoo and Aquarium. And Melbourne Aquarium had them for a while too, though they disappeared before it was Merlinised, and don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone? I'm not sure I appreciated them enough, because from I knew they were just standard aquarium fish.

They seem very, very rare in captivity now, which is a terrible shame both because they seem doomed to extinction in the wild, and because if they *could* be established in captivity they would rocket up the list of charismatic marine ABCs faster than you can say 'Finding Jigsaw': a Pixar spin-off with a difference, perhaps? But silly diversions aside, it was wonderful to see them at Genoa: ZTL tells me they're at Valencia too but if so I didn't notice.

Apart from the sawfish, the major keystone exhibits are pretty unremarkable, and on the whole they are starting to show the facility's age: at 25 it's becoming a creaking old vessel as far as public aquaria go. The harbour seal tank was quite dirty when I went, but I saw divers cleaning various exhibits whilst I was there so hopefully I just caught it at a bad time. The dolphin exhibit was a decent-ish size for dolphins given this is a 'traditional' aquarium built along a pier, with the space constraints that necessarily imposes.

The penguins had yet another underwhelming sub-Antarctic exhibit, and I'm starting to wonder if I've simply been spoiled by having seen both Sea World and Nagoya's excellent Antarctic penguin exhibits. The species here are the common gentoos and the much less common (and much less sub-Antarctic) Magellanics.

The other particularly noteworthy exhibit was a big open-topped pool for what must have been close to 20 sturgeon of half a dozen or so species. I didn't note down which species, and now that I look at ZTL I assume this must be quite a new exhibit because it makes no mention of sturgeons being at Genoa.

I don't really have much to contribute about the rest of the aquarium, other than to say that the handful of reptile exhibits are all of a very high standard, including one that is a very nice representation of a Madagascan spiny forest for a mix of Madagascan lizards and tortoises. There's a tropical house and (I think) butterfly garden on the top floor but it was an extra fee to enter so I didn't go in (only €2 I think, but I was feeling poor). I am regretting this greatly now that I have since learned there were hummingbirds inside. It has all the standard supporting-cast tanks: moray eels, an octopus, jellyfish, piranha and Amazon river monsters, and these are all of a piece with equivalent exhibits everywhere else.

I will finish by paying credit to Genoa for the truly excellent standard of signage and interpretative features throughout the aquarium. Education and research are things that for-profit aquaria (which I imagine, though am not sure, that Genoa is). But that's clearly not the case here. There's detailed information for anybody who wants it about the Mediterranean monk seal, about Antarctica and especially about the research they are involved with of local dolphin pods. There's also an extensive set of interp panels on key contributors to nautical and natural history, including local favourite son Christopher Columbus, James Cook, Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin.

I don't think Genoa is a must-visit, and it's well away from anything that might resemble a standard Zoochattes' trail. But if you're in the area - for the Cinque Terre, perhaps - it's certainly worthwhile.

 

Zoo #18, Haus des Meeres, 27/4/17 and #19, Tiergarten Schonbrunn, 29/4/17

Another double shot, both to ensure that I keep on track and because without it the first post would be on the scanty side.

I'd toyed both with not going to Haus des Meeres at all, and with going to it after rather than before Vienna's main event. I was prevaricating all the way until 5 minutes before I left the hostel whether to go on a rainy, cold Thursday or wait until a public holiday weekend (Monday being May Day here).

I'd just decided on rain being preferable to crowds when fate intervened. I was going into a supermarket to buy supplies and turned to hold one of those swinging metal gate things open for the person behind me. He wasn't anticipating that, though, and was pushing the gate open with his trolley. The result: one crushed hand.

For a while I feared at least one of the fingers was broken, which would have caused all manner of problems from having to find a doctor, to not being able to fill out immigration and customs forms at borders, to the most pressing of all: not being able to inject my insulin.

Luckily it wasn't as bad as all that, though I have one very purple and still quite sore finger. Regardless, by the time I'd gone back to the hostel to ice it, contacted a friend who is a rehab specialist to determine what I needed to do and found a pharmacy for some painkillers and medical tape (but most importantly the painkillers), it was 2PM: too late in the day to head to the zoo.

Instead, I went to Vienna's smallish but charming natural history museum (which has, among other exhibits of interest here, a paddlefish, an enormous sunfish, a thylacine and cases for several of each of kakapos and kiwis). And once that was done I was able to take advantage of Haus des Meeres' late opening hours on a Thursday.

I was interested in this place less for the collection itself than the very strange setting. For those who aren't familiar it is built inside a World War II flak tower. The building is tall but slender, and the aquarium is set across no fewer than 10 floors. Before that starts to sound like a substantial aquarium though, many of those floors have room for only two or three small exhibits by the time space is allocated to the elevator shaft, stairs, life support systems and other off-display facilities

The collection itself is unremarkable apart from one genuine shock: a Chinese giant salamander. I've seen Japanese ones here and there, but the Chinese species is much rarer, both in captivity and the wild, yes? It occupies a tank with a couple of white sturgeon and other fish.

There are three shark tanks - a small one on the 10th floor for bonnethead sharks, a 'Pacific Eye' kelp forest tank that has horn sharks and is only viewable through a bubble window, and the largest of the three houses blacktip and whitetip sharks as well as a Green sea turtle (and miscellaneous bony fish), spreading across two floors.

The aquarium claims that its largest tank - on the ground floor and including a tunnel portion - holds 500,000 litres, but if that tank is 500 cubic metres in size then I'm a very poor judge. To be honest I've already forgotten what was in there, but felt it was wasted somewhat.

There are a lot of very nice reptile exhibits scattered up and down the building, and there are lots of small tanks, especially on lower floors, for small fish and aquatic invertebrates, both marine and freshwater. There are decent, if very space-constrained, mixed-species tropical houses on both sides of the building, one of which houses Goeldi's monkeys and white-faced sakis that seem *very* habituated to visitors being less than 50cm away.

The Haus des Meeres is interesting, though I don't think I'd visit based on its strengths as an aquarium as opposed to the curiosity of its location. The question I have, which wasn't really answered, is why? Why build an aquarium in this building that is fundamentally ill-suited to it? A shark tank on the 10th floor? I don't really get it.

The real zoological drawcard in Vienna is, of course, Schonbrunn. My visit was a little troubled from the outset: I am prone to bouts of insomnia, no doubt related to my diabetes (and perhaps in this case a very sore hand): and one of these bouts set in in earnest in Vienna. By the time Saturday rolled around I'd had three successive nights with less than six hours sleep. I know many manage on that quite well, but I don't and I gave serious consideration to going to Vienna on Monday, a public holiday, instead. That I decided not to was partly to minimise the number of pram jams I would have to deal with, but also to ensure that I at least had a chance of doing everything else I wanted to in and around Vienna. And it wasn't as if I were going to get back to sleep that day anyway.

So I was perhaps a little primed to be irritable and disgruntled when I went to the zoo. I entered from the gate closest to the giant pandas - a lovely outdoor exhibit that ranks among the better ones I've seen for blob bears. But the other exhibits in this area underwhelmed. Was this lion exhibit really what one expects from a contender for best zoo in the world? No, I didn't think so.

I was baffled by what I found in the hippo exhibit. On the positive side, there was a much better land to water ratio than in accustomed to seeing. But what I didn't and don't understand is why the hippos were locked outside, but without access to the water? All three were lying out in the sun because that was all they were able to do. It was the middle of a sunny day. I couldn't make sense of it.

At this point I was beginning to think I would fall on Arizona Docent's side of the debate, that Vienna was a decent but ultimately unremarkable place. But then a stroke of fortune began to change everything.

I had received the news of the bird flu-prompted closure of the desert, rainforest and bird houses with absolute dismay. Apart from wanting to see all of one of the world's most famous zoos, one message that came through in AD's own thread about Vienna was that they were among the very best the zoo had to offer. So to miss out was galling, no matter how just the reason. I communicated with the zoo via Facebook to try to ascertain if they knew when they would reopen, but the best answer they could give me was that there would be tests performed in late April, and the results would need to be uniformly negative for the situation to change.

I gave up all hope. I even looked into making a lightning strike back to Vienna later in the trip, before largely discarding the idea as impractical. And so I resigned myself to seeing half a zoo, and perhaps the more underwhelming part at that. So try to imagine my joy, then, when I approached the Regenwald building and saw people going in and out! Two and a half of the buildings are open again, and given the timetable the zoo mentioned to me it must have been a very close run thing. Who knows, perhaps it was my poor bruised finger that made the difference.

By the way, the 'half' that remains closed is the rainforest portion of the bird house, which was closed on the rather surprising basis that one of the species within is currently breeding. Frankly I think that's a very poor reason to close an entire exhibit: if breeding the species is important enough to provide them with privacy from the public then all well and good. Better to pull them off exhibit, keep them separately and make sure the show goes on. Imagine how often walk-through aviaries would be closed if all zoos adopted this practice. However, two and a half open houses are better than none and I am not looking this gift horse in the mouth. All are excellent exhibits, even if I rather wish I'd done a bit better with my passerine hunt.

And so the tone of the day shifted, and my initial discontent slowly morphed into genuine delight. The tiger and spectacled bear exhibits are very good indeed. The aquarium and reptile house is a gem, as are the various other reptile exhibits scattered here and there. Unlike Zurich, where I was immediately awed by what I found, Vienna's charms revealed themselves to me slowly. There is nothing as groundbreaking as Masaola here, and I think on most paired comparisons (elephants to elephants, tigers to tigers and so on) I would still place Zurich ahead. But pairwise comparison isn't infallible, and Vienna has character that Zurich doesn't.

Vienna's history is its blessing and, to only a limited extent, its curse. I'm guessing heritage overlays exist over the entire circle of exhibits surrounding the old pavilion, and for good reason. But they've done a lot to make them the best exhibits they can: I like how they have installed the window panels to enable the gates at the front of each paddock to be opened. It's a small touch that changes the feel of the exhibit. And using what was once an iron cage to turn into a viewing point into the cheetah exhibit is a subtle master stroke that will go unnoticed by 99% of people who visit, but I appreciated it.

Moreso than the Jardin des Plantes, which I described as a living museum, Vienna remains a living, evolving zoo. It just takes more adaptability than, say, Zurich needs to have. For a 265 year old that has quite literally been through the wars, it looks pretty damn good.

I'm not sure I agree with our learned colleague Mr Sheridan about Vienna's pre-eminence in Europe... but I'm not sure yet that I don't, either. That's a question I think I'll return to in time.

 

Fair enough. I am retrospectively less amazed by its presence, then.

 

I think Singapore has Japanese Giant Salamanders? I can't think where else I'd have seen them, not having been to Japan.

I'm intrigued by Haus des Meers. Frankly it sounds like a ridiculous place, and therefore thouroughly worth visiting. Is it Vienna that has the separate Desert House to the zoo?

This is a great thread for learning new things; I had never heard of the Genoa Aquarium. I wonder if the more recent Blue Planet in Copenhagen has knocked it out of the top three. How do you compare what you've seen in Europe to the Japanese establishments?

 

With four floors and >30 million exhibits, this is anything but a "smallish" museum; some people spend hours if not days in the avian section alone...

 

Yes.

And the Haus des Meeres isn't ridiculous, but a great example of a modern, constantly improving privately owned public aquarium - which happens to be the only aquarium to my knowledge with a climbing gym on its outer surface.
Chinese Giant Salamanders are actually commercially farmed in China these days for human consumption - which doesn't decrease the pressure on the in-situ populations, though.

 

A gang of Zoochatters, myself included, did the NHM in Vienna in the afternoon after Haus des Meeres in the morning. We were eventually asked to leave by a security guard as they needed to close. It's a great museum. Some nice rare mounted specimens and more meteorites than I ever needed to see..!

 

Ok, 'smallish' was probably the wrong word, but I only have so much patience for dead animals.

 

I can't remember whether the one in River Safari is Chinese or Japanese. @Zooish - consider this your bat signal.

Dunno about Blue Planet. It would be interesting if one were able to visit and assess all four in the same year, would it not? But we shall have to see if it proves possible.

My top six aquaria that I've been to, in order, would be Valencia, Lisbon, Osaka, Sumida, Singapore and the pre-Merlinised Sydney. I will never visit the Sydney Aquarium again, by the way. Georgia Aquarium - a big one but not necessarily a great one - is probably seventh.

Sumida is the odd one out in that it isn't a mega aquarium. I never got around to writing it up, alas, but it's an absolute gem and a must visit - even though I've put it behind Osaka here, if you only had one day and could visit either I'd say go to Sumida, because it is unique. I described it to my girlfriend as an art installation with fish.

 

The not-so-smallish NHM actually used to have a nice vivarium section till 2010, including various terraria, fresh and saltwater aquaria, aviaries etc. Then the new museum management caved in to the pressure of the local anti-captivity lobby.

 

@CGSwans Interesting. You wrote very highly about Osaka I think so that does suggest the quality of the best of Europe is of another standard.

I am looking forward to more about the museums on the trip as well.

@Batto I did not mean to imply anything negative by 'ridiculous', just that it sounds a little improbable

 

I admit it has taken me a while to learn the first rule of zebra crossings, which is that no notice is taken of them until you're actually out walking on the zebra crossing. It's a test of courage.

And very funny. Very, very funny.