CGSwans flies north for the winter

I'd be most disappointed if they weren't!

 

Did you see the Earless Monitors at Budapest as I believe they are held on show now?

It was interesting to read your review of Budapest, many of your opinions are similar to mine from my visit about three years ago and my lasting impression is of a great zoo but with too many of the large animals in small enclosures.

Apparently Budapest is planning to build a large 'biodome' but I'm not sure if there has been any physical progress on this plan, I haven't heard of any.

 

I did see some banners promoting something of that sort, though I couldn't read them and it slipped my mind. It looked... ambitious.

I can't recall seeing earless monitors either, but that's not to say they aren't there.

 

The Biome should be built around 2020 and will use newly acquired land adjacent to the zoo. The concept art features asian elephants and chimpanzees; I did not realise until your report that the zoo does not hold chimps and given what you've said it seems a touch unreasonable to go into them.

 

I take it the thermal baths you visited were the ones in the park opposite the zoo? I visited these baths after a full day at the zoo and would recommend them to anyone. I got there at 7pm and floated around until they closed at 10pm. It's quite a unique experience enhanced by their open air design, it was great watching it get dark and the stars appearing over head.
As for the zoo, I concur with your views. Most of the large animals need better enclosures but there are some good small animal exhibits.

 

Are you glad you visited Bratislava Zoo @CGSwans? I'm not sure it would pass the 'Usti Test' for me. Did you get a chance to see anything else in the city?

 

Yes, it was those ones. Wish I'd been able to stay later.

No, I wanted to but it didn't work out. I wouldn't have gone if I hadn't mixed up the train route, but I don't regret visiting. It was an interesting visit, though I wouldn't return without significant changes.

My 'Usti test' is today, as it happens.

 

Zoo #22 - Bucharest Zoo, 14/5/2017

I'd added Bucharest to the list not on its reputation, of course - it barely has one - and not out of any great expectations. I went purely because I was going to be in Romania for over a week, and I thought I'd give its biggest zoo a chance. I'd gone ready for a potentially unpleasant afternoon but, well, I'll be damned if this isn't a good little zoo.

It's only a small site - about six hectares - and if you look at the zoo map on the website it looks like a whole bunch of boring square grass paddocks. Well, the exhibits are indeed all squares and rectangles, but the zoo is actually very well covered by trees, so it's aesthetically much nicer than I was anticipating. It costs 13 lei - about €3 - to enter but another 13 to take photos. I have a mind to add some to the gallery if they turn out ok so I begrudgingly paid the money. Don't say I never buy you lot anything.

I covered the zoo in a roughly clockwise direction from the front entrance, starting with three Siberian tiger exhibits. This was my first hint that I was in for a good couple of hours because, while they are basic wire mesh constructions, they are large with lots of vegetation and reasonable climbing opportunities. Cats are a specialty here - they have eight species - and all of the big cats in particular have great exhibits, matching or in some cases exceeding the average for their species in Western zoos.

There's an enclosure in the centre of the zoo there's marked for tigers, but now houses a snow leopard (or possibly two). It might not render an impression of the Himalayas, as Zurich does, but it's *massive* considering how often snow leopards get short-changed. A pair of lions have a nice big enclosure, and multiple cages have been consolidated for a jaguar and an Amur leopard (unseen) respectively, so that each has quite a bit more space than they often get.

The same high standard applies to the other big carnivores. The brown beer has another enclosure that wouldn't look out of place in the West - indeed, it reminds me of Melbourne's before it was torn down. It's not massive, but it's complex and has organic features. Bratislava and Madrid might want to take a look. A trio of Arctic wolves have another very generous exhibit: it's heavily forested and probably too muddy (the weather has been sub-tropical here), but it's nothing that couldn't be fixed.

The standard drops somewhat for smaller carnivores. There's a decent serval exhibit that has glass on the front, which I suspect marks it out as one of the newest developments of the zoo. But a Eurasian lynx and a wild cat (unseen) have quite too small cages, and the same could be said for most of the other small carnivores. There are some - for binturong, banded mongoose, fennec fox and genet - that are wholly indoors, and I'd like that to change for the mongooses in particular. There's was a very dark, dingy broom closet. Same goes for the others, but at least they are nocturnal species.

A handful of rodent enclosures are broadly the same standard as the small carnivores, but there's one for a gray squirrel that is very generous indeed. It has a weird structure on the ground that I took to be a maze, but that doesn't make much sense for a species that can very easily just climb over the top.

The ungulates (and ratites) are all arrayed along the back of the zoo in a series of small square paddocks. These are all ok, although there's quite fine mesh used on some that badly impedes viewing. The exotics here are Damara zebras, eland, Barbary sheep, mouflon, fallow deer and roe deer, and there's a bunch of domestics including two enclosures for horses (a Clydesdale or similar in one, and five ponies in another) and all four species of domestic camelid.

I wouldn't suggest moving out of domestics entirely, but they could move things around and add a couple of charismatic exotic species quite readily, I think. As I was playing Zoochat Tycoon in my head I was imagining moving the Clydesdale on, shunting the half a dozen goats from their large, lush paddock into something smaller and getting rid of two of the four camelids (dromedaries and alpacas, for example). From there, the big flock of rhea (about ten, half of them white) could be mixed with the llamas, and there's scope for tapir or capybara to potentially join them. With some rejigging of space I think it would be possible to make room for two giraffes readily enough, which would be an achievable, very big drawcard.

The primate collection is small and maybe slightly troubled by legacy issues. There are standard exhibits for three callitrichids, and two for ring-tailed and red ruffed lemurs. The ring-taileds have a bicycle - yes, a bicycle - in their enclosure. I didn't see them riding it. There are individual green monkeys and Javan macaques and a pair of Hamadryas baboons in typical mid-20th century concrete jungles. The exhibits would be massively improved with some organic substrate - they're ok, otherwise - but my concern here was more that the animals didn't have appropriate social groups. I don't know that that's easily fixed, unfortunately.

Bucharest had more surprises in store when I went into the reptile house: in addition to a handful of very well-done terraria there were also four aquaria, including bichirs, freshwater stingrays and a coral tank. The reptile collection is unremarkable - mostly the standard big constrictors, big lizards, tortoises and a Nile croc - but a blue-tailed monitor and (for non-Australians) a frilled dragon might excite some interest. The only problem exhibit here was for the croc, which has well and truly outgrown its pool.

There's a decent bird collection notable mostly for an immense variety of waterfowl: I counted 22 species that were sign-posted (though didn't find several) and I'm quite sure there were more that didn't have signage. Most of these birds are in a series of aviaries near the Tigers that are densely covered by ivy, so they're quite dark. They have relatively small pools and there were a *lot* of birds in them: probably over 100 ducks and geese across the five cages. They all looked to be in good condition though.

The zoo is taking strong precautions against bird flu: the big mixed group of Dalmatian and white pelicans - probably about 30 birds all told - were shut inside, as were the inhabitants of another mixed waterfowl exhibit and peafowl. A ring of pheasant aviaries were all empty so I'm guessing they were locked away too. A row of raptor and owl aviaries were unaffected.

There's a building called the 'Exotaria' that is basically a bird house, primarily for parrots. Some of the exhibits have lushly-planted outdoor aviaries attached but once again the birds were all shut in. This complex was one of the weakest parts of the zoo. Two of the exhibits seemed massively over-stocked: 43 Quaker parrots were in an office cubicle-sized room, and an identical exhibit housed perhaps as many as 100 lovebirds. I know they're colonial species but it still seemed too much. There were some macaws and eclectus parrots here showing poor feather condition, but apart from that they all looked healthy.

It might look like I'm describing a disappointing zoo. I'm not, I'm picking fault with a genuinely good one. The issues are relatively minor: throw €200,000 at it and most of the problem exhibits - binturong, mongoose, getting some of the parrots outside - are fixed. There's even an existing pool in a state of disrepair that could be fixed up to form a basis for a new croc exhibit.

Bucharest is not going to be a top 50 or even top 100 zoo across Europe, but it would hold its own against most of the smaller private English zoos, for instance. And given the relative poverty of Romania, with what I doubt is a city budget with largesse to splash on the zoo, I suspect that's a fairer comparison, resources-wise, than most other capital city zoos. This isn't a hodgepodge menagerie by any stretch: it's a fully fledged zoo playing the hand it was dealt and doing quite a fine job of it.

 

How can the home zoo of Dracula not have vampire bats? It's a tourism gold mine that they're missing...

Thanks for the review of this zoo.

 

You forgot to mention the single specimen of Cantor's giant softshell turtle (Pelochelys cantorii) kept there.

It isn't. Romanians in general don't like their culture to be reduced to vampires (and gypsies), and the country has more to offer than just Transylvania. The historic Vlad the Impaler, on which Bram Stoker based his Count Dracula on, is portrayed as a cruel yet just national hero in Romania these days, not as the humanoid vampire bat of Hollywood fame.
If at all, the zoo could portray the great diversity of chiroptera species native to Romania (33 at a recent survey).

 

That'd be because I didn't see it, nor any exhibit where it might be displayed.

 

Second part of the reptile house, 1st (if I remember correctly) enclosure on the left side. Likes to hide below the submerged root.

 

No sign of it this time. But I'm not entirely sure I can visualise the 'second part' of the reptile house so maybe I missed a bit,

 

Zoo #23 - Sofia Zoo, Bulgaria, 18/5/2017

This might be another post that's rather shorter than warranted, as I am falling behind on both writing projects and have had a particularly bad run health-wise in recent days. Hopefully we'll get back on track soon.

I prevaricated all the way up until half an hour before arriving at the zoo gate over whether to visit Sofia Zoo. I had somewhat less than hopeful expectations, but Bucharest had surprised on the upside and I had a couple of hours (there's not all that much to do in Sofia), so curiosity got the better of me.

As usual, upon entering I turned left and worked roughly counter-clockwise around the zoo. Wrapping around the entrance I used is a massive water feature that hosts a variety of pelicans, ducks and geese. It's not a particularly picturesque lake but it does the job. The first thing you notice as you get into the zoo proper is the state of the paths. Walking around Sofia generally is more or less asking for a sprained ankle, with broken and uneven paths the rule more or less everywhere. At peak hour the entire city chimes with the music of thousands of broken tiles constantly being stepped on. The zoo isn't that bad, but the paths still look more like a down-at-heel back street than anything we might be used to in Western zoos.

The first major exhibit is a decidedly Stalinist-era monument-style construction that features aviaries for griffon vultures on one side and a (golden?) eagle on the other. These are both of a decent size, though I was bemused to see a pair of stray cats strolling right into the eagle's side. Evidently the eagle doesn't bother them.

Aside from a surprisingly decent, densely planted exhibit for coatis (I saw one, but there may have been others) the rest of this portion of the zoo was grim. There are two enclosures labelled for Siberian tigers and jaguars that could reasonably be described as dungeons, with the aesthetic quality associated with such a loaded term, but more importantly devoid of organic features, enrichment opportunities or adequate space. I didn't see a cat in either and assumed they were either empty or, worse, the cats were simply locked inside. I didn't have a likely answer to that until quite later in the visit.

The primate collection is concentrated in two buildings in this section of the zoo. You walk down a long corridor and pass a series of ugly, damp, rusty exemplars of the blighted 'bathroom' style exhibit. Most had outdoor spaces that were still quite grim, but between the two components of each exhibit they could at least offer some variety and space to the animals. However, most of them were locked inside.

This was a constant theme throughout the zoo. A building that might once have been called a 'Pachyderm House' - for elephant, rhino and both hippos - actually wasn't too bad: not good, but not too bad. There were only single individuals of each (I didn't spot the pygmy hippo/s at all), and the elephant and hippo were each shut inside. The rhino could access its rather too small platform of an outdoor yard. It was the same story when I came to the bears: four exhibits, three no shows. A brown bear was outside, but if the other animals are still present they were locked away.

I got a (probable) answer regarding the horrific tiger and jaguar cages when I found my way to a curious complex that's a mix of big cat house, small mammal house, reptile house and aquarium. The reptile collection is surprisingly diverse and well-housed: the exhibits aren't fancy but they are typically generous in size. The aquarium is a little odd: in addition to a series of small tanks, mostly for pet shop standards, are two bigger tanks that have strobe light effects, moving from orange, to red, to green, blue, purple and yellow. Very strange.

Wrapping around this building are a series of brand new (ie, not yet completed) outdoor exhibits for big cats. This is the first sign of development at the zoo that could realistically belong to the last 20 years, and discovering it did elevate my view of the place. The outdoor exhibits are still small, and there were yet more animals (lions, this time, which already have outdoor quarters here) inexplicably locked inside. But the fact that new facilities are being built is greatly encouraging, and one can only hope that a new primate complex follows ASAP.

The bird collection is not reflected at all on Zootierliste: there is actually a modest but varied collection of parrots, vultures, owls, pheasants, pigeons and miscellaneous odds'n'sods. Most of the birds are in a single row of small aviaries: the largest aviary, aside from the Stalin-era bird of prey thing, hosts a flock of feral pigeons, of all things.

Sofia is not a good zoo. Move it much further northwest and I'd be downright scathing in my criticisms, but one has to keep in mind that Bulgaria is a poor country, and I have no doubt that the director struggles to find a sympathetic hearing when he or she pleads for money for capital works. There are some animals here for which I have welfare concerns (most notably the solitary elephant, whose physical needs may well be met but is deprived of a social structure). But mostly it's just on the right side of ok. If you're an ungulate, small mammal or a reptile, you're mostly doing reasonably well here, but if you're a primate or a big carnivore you just desperately want to be allowed out in the fresh air. I couldn't make head or tail of the sheer number of animals locked inside on a sunny spring day.

 

I have been in Sofia but I have not been to Sofia zoo, because I know what can I expect. There were critics about this zoo on a Bulgarian TV channel, comparing it with the Skopje zoo in R. Macedonia, presenting the latter as a good example (with a lot of greenery). I am extremely curious what will be your next 5 zoos, CGSwans.
In my opinion, Greece is amazing (as are some parts of southern R. Macedonia - e.g., one of the oldest-in-the world, natural, subtropical lake of Ohrid), as Athens is, and the Attica zoological park is good and beautiful. If you are lucky enough, you can even see the rare Mediterranean monk seal in the rehabilitating station at the zoo, close to the entrance of the dolphinarium.

 

Zoo #24: Attica Zoo, 24/05/2017

Apologies for both the lateness and brevity of this one. I've been sick and my writing is very much stuck, so I'm switching from one project to the other (ie, this one) in the hope of getting started again.

Attica came in the middle of the worst week of the trip: a train delayed so that what was already an 11:30PM arrival in Athens became 3:30AM, a cold that turned into a full-blown chest infection, diabetes trouble that comes along with that and, as a parting gift from Sofia, bed bugs. Urgh. A zoo is my happy place, and I needed a happy place.

I didn't arrive until about 3PM, but that was fine because the zoo remains open until approximately sunset, and at this time of the year that means 8:30, though I only stayed until 7: plenty of time to get around in unhurried fashion. I wasn't sure what to expect: all I knew was that Attica had started out as bird-centric and has since fleshed out a relatively full suite of popular mammals as well.

I started out with the parrot section. I can't reiterate enough how much I love parrots. Outrageously good looking with brash, extroverted personalities, they are everything I am not but I guess opposites attract. A zoo can throw ten, twenty, thirty species at me and I won't get bored. Attica doesn't quite get that high - I counted 27 - but they are all in excellently sized aviaries, and having them all in the one zone makes for a deafening, but delightful start to the afternoon. It won't be part of this trip, but Loro Parque is on the bucket list and if it ever happens would likely be a two-day visit.

The monkeys and big cats are also concentrated in this part of the zoo, along with the part of the Savannah exhibit (which sprawls across several interlinked paddocks). I'm assuming this is the oldest portion of the zoo, but while it is simple in construction all of the exhibits are generous and full of usable features for the animals. About my only complaint is that I sought shelter from a brief but heavy rain shower, only to find all the roofed areas have thatch and leak badly. So I was just a little damp for the rest of the visit.

Parrots aside, the bird collection is substantial but didn't this place once claim to have the third largest collection in Europe or something like that? That seems like a very dubious claim to me. There's a couple of good-sized flight aviaries that are largely wasted on waterfowl and wading birds, as flight aviaries so often seem to be in Europe. There's a good row of planted aviaries mainly for passerines and pheasants, though I only netted another seven species for the challenge, which continues to be very slow going.

I'm scratching around for things to say because so much of the zoo has the same basic construction of wire cages - though as I've said previously I don't mind this where it maximises usable space for inhabitants, as it does for primates. One thing I noticed was that many exhibits are overgrown with weed-like Attic scrub plants, which is either a sign of lax maintenance or of taking advantage of the local environment to maximise vegetation in a relatively arid location. I prefer the latter, though I don't think it quite works aesthetically.

By far the most disappointing exhibit was the reptile house, a building of ugly brick enclosures - they look like the outside of a pizza oven - that are dark and featureless inside. A good third or so we're unoccupied and those that were mostly had pet shop standards, several of whom were morphs. It lets down an otherwise high quality zoo.

The zoo has one of those instinctively crazy but actually quite safe mixes of cheetahs and rhinos. Mind you, the cheetahs were curled up right up along the fence, above a haha so the rhinos couldn't reach them, and I wonder if staying out of their way is their abiding concern. This is a mix that typically works better for rhinos than cheetahs, I suspect. But the closeness of the cheetahs to visitors - I was only two metres away - also reflected a pattern for much of the zoo, of animals being quite relaxed around, and sometimes even highly engaged with, the visitors. Perhaps hand-raising is commonly practiced here.

I got lucky with the lynxes, who had brought down a bird and were taking turns playing with it until it died, and even then they were much more interested in looking for signs of life than in eating it.

I have one final observation: this zoo has by far the best prairie dog exhibit I've ever seen, and I'll go further and say it's the best rodent exhibit I've seen. It's massive - impossible to get it all in one photo - and there is effectively no barrier between visitor and prairie dog: all that keeps them in is a steep drop of a metre or so down onto hard concrete, but I guess this must be a sufficient deterrent. Though now I'm writing this I wonder how feral cats aren't a problem. Maybe they are, but the prairie dogs are simply good at what they do. It's a gorgeous exhibit so I hope it works properly.

All up, I was more than pleased with Attica. I needed something to go right in Athens, and Attica gave it to me.

 

How you will describe this zoo (Attica Z. P.), CGSwans, in one word: nice, very nice, great, not bad, .. ?

 

In one word? Reasonable.

 

Zoo #25 - Bioparco Rome, 3/6/2017

More writing difficulties, not helped by having visited a thoroughly unremarkable zoo. I don't mean 'bad', I just mean unremarkable.

Bioparco - this is one of the thankfully dwindling number of places that is ashamed of the word 'zoo' - is a conventional, mammal-centric ABC collection. It's not a place to go for species life ticks. For Zoochat challenge purposes I netted no new passerines, and the only 'new' primate was red ruffed lemurs, which I've seen at least half a dozen times on this trip but which I hadn't realised until last week were now recognised as distinct from the black & whites.

Mammals aside, there's an interesting reptile house with a confusing opening exhibit - a walk-through for scarlet ibis - but some cool species (Solomon Islands boa, Cuban ground iguana, giant musk turtle). There's a potentially good geodesic dome aviary that's wasted, like seemingly every other big aviary in Europe, by housing the usual assortment of waterfowl and wading birds.

Some of the exhibits are very good, including a generous brown bear enclosure with ample natural elements, and the tamarin exhibits are so lushly planted that it took several minutes of patient searching until I found the cotton-tops. A couple are poor, such as an antiquated elephant exhibit. But most fall into that Death Valley for zoo reviews of being neither here nor there. What is one to say?

I'm going to cheat. I'm going to write about the zoo I wish I'd visited instead.

As I was wandering about I felt that Rome is meeting its raison d'être more or less as well as any other zoo I've visited in Southern Europe: to provide a space for locals to see exotic wildlife, with basic welfare needs met and providing an opportunity, should guests want it, to learn more about the environmental catastrophe unfolding outside the gates. Indeed, Rome does this well with an exhibit type I haven't seen before: the 'Museum of Environmental Crimes', which spotlights issues such as animal trafficking, habitat pollution and the like.

But I wanted more. Rome is one of the world's great cities - the Eternal City - and a great city deserves more than a middling zoo. So I walked around entertaining thoughts about how it might benefit from the same attempt at reinvention that Paris tried and arguably botched. I started playing ZoochatTycoon in my head, and it hit me. There is a zoo concept that could work, and it could only work in one city in the world.

The Roman Empire Zoo.

Here's a scratch list of ABC species that either currently live in territories formerly part of the Roman Empire, or that did during the Roman period: African elephant, giraffe, onager, hippopotamus, wisent, lion, tiger (Caspian), cheetah, leopard, brown bear, grey wolf, harbour seal, European otter, striped hyena, Barbary macaque, greater flamingo, ostrich and golden eagle. Is that not a good basis for a major zoo?

You could put lions next to deer and wisent, and highlight how they were hunted to extinction across Europe during the classical period. The elephant exhibit can tell the story of Hannibal marching elephants across the Alps, and expand that into a story about how humans have used - and misused - animals in wartime. You could have a small amphitheatre for shows that contrasts how the zoo displays its animals with the barbarity they were subjected to in the Roman era.

A wolf exhibit would showcase Rome's founding mythology. An Egyptian exhibit might feature not only giraffes, hippos and Nile crocs, but also an exhibit with jackals, ibis, falcons and baboons could explore the role of animals in religious contexts.

A small reptile house could feature the likes of Greek tortoises, Nile monitors, various turtles, vipers and so on. You could have an aquarium with Red Sea, Mediterranean and even North Sea and Atlantic exhibits. The seemingly obligatory wading birds aviary could be focused on the Camargue, flamingoes and all.

The only weakness is primates, so I think you would have to retain a rainforest house for a few, but it could be built on the other side of the road that bisects the zoo, and could incorporate the big aviary that is no doubt protected by a heritage overlay. But that physical separation avoids from undermining the theme.

This would be a unique concept zoo, with a story to tell, and tying it so closely to the Roman history people go to Rome to visit would attract international tourists who currently totally ignore the zoo. Who wants to become Mayor of Rome and build it for me?