Blijdorp Zoo, Netherlands - February 2016 Travelling by train from Amsterdam I had planned to spend a good 6 hours in Blijdorp zoo, Rotterdam. I ended up spending about two hours at the station due to various cancellations. This then meant that I would only have four hours at the zoo. I arrived at the gates, and it turns out reciprocal free entry for members of Chester Zoo is no longer an option, with only a few collections listed at the tills. I didn’t realise prior to my arrival, but it seems I managed to ensure that the leg of my trip in the Netherlands coincided with a school holiday, so each of the city zoos were extremely busy. I started my visit to Blijdorp with Biotopia – a huge hall packed with screaming children; it felt more like a soft play area (which it is, in part) than part of a historic zoo. An uncomfortable building; the conservatory café is pleasant, but the humidity here and in the adjacent rainforest hall are just too much to handle for any length of time. As a first-time visitor, I couldn’t begin to imagine how amazing this place was when it was still teeming with rare animals. The outdoor enclosures are generally of a high standard (with a few striking exceptions), and I was strongly reminded of some of the enclosures at Chester Zoo, especially for hoofstock, although perhaps there’s a flavour of Leipzig in there too. As in similar zoos, I felt that the indoor enclosures stole the show. Taman Indah – effectively the elephant house – is a pleasant and modern South East Asian-themed building showcasing a surprising number of larger animals, with the highlight among the smaller residents probably being Balabac mousedeer; but I felt the building was shouting out for more of these interesting little residents. The Asian House feels a bit more of a reptile house with some similar efforts to Taman Indah – this is effectively a Komodo dragon display with a few aviaries and vivaria, although here the smaller animals are much more of a priority. Balabac mousedeer pop up here too. Crocodile house – a fascinating display with rocky cliffs lining predominantly reptile enclosures. Here we also have hyrax, bulbuls and meerkats sharing the open spaces, with plenty of tilapia fish in the pools, and a few glass-fronted enclosures starring their black-and-rufous elephant shrew. Parallel, but running on the other side of the rocky cliffs (in a different building) are new indoor enclosures for okapi. Amazonica – A very impressive butterfly dome with pools of giant Amazonian fish. Very well-planted and great signage. I think this must be one of the best in-zoo butterfly exhibits around. Oceanium – an outstanding aquarium in its own right, brimming with unusual animals and interesting fish from across the world. Displays are good, and it’s fascinating to walk around, my issue was that it seemed a bit neglected. Some of the coral reef tanks look very tired and poorly-stocked, some of the signs are very old indeed, there are quite a few empty enclosures; the sea otter enclosure, for instance, remains empty with signs for sea otters still present. Nonetheless, this enormous complex is fascinating and could easily be a satisfying standalone attraction (with a little bit of work). Overall a great zoo and a really enjoyable first visit, but I completely understand why those who experienced the zoo at another level feel disappointed. I'd look forward to returning, but I can't see that there's much to push me to return soon.
Burgers' Zoo, Netherlands - February 2016 This one is a slightly troubled post. Further train delays in Amsterdam meant that I arrived at the zoo a couple of hours after opening. I thought I stayed until 5.30pm (after closing) only to discover on leaving the zoo that: a) Most of the zoo was open until 8pm that night due to ‘Burgers lights’, a holiday event b) It was actually 4.30pm. It seems my phone (and therefore my smartwatch) had reverted to UK time and thus driven a sudden panic when I thought I lost an hour in Burgers Bush. No matter. I saw all of the zoo and most of the animals. To check the times I thought I’d just look at my photos. Unfortunately the next day (whilst with vogelcommando in Artis) I discovered that very few of my photos from Burgers survived, as the camera didn’t record anything beyond the last 5 photos I had taken. Despite recovery attempts, I have gained no further photos. I therefore only have a few photos from the start of my visit to Burgers and a few from the end of our visit to Artis (before & after changing the SD card). I really liked Burgers. A very impressive zoo. The outdoor enclosures are nice enough, with a lot of interesting exhibits (like Rimba and the giant Safari enclosure), but the real highlights are the enormous indoor biomes. I liked Burgers Desert – a lot of enclosures in this giant themed hall are not particularly special, but still nice. The species list here (and throughout the zoo, in fairness), is very interesting. With repeated visits to the enclosures I managed to get a good sighting (and decent photos ) of a ringtail, and enjoyed the free-flying birds. Burgers Desert is connected to Burgers Bush by a corridor which also contains many interesting enclosures. Burgers Bush itself is amazing; a giant tropical hall with enclosures for animals around the world and another incredible free-ranging species list. Birds around here include the screaming piha (Lipaugus vociferans), a bird whose call you will recognise and probably already associate with the rainforest. Repeatedly walking the paths here kept yielding more and more free-ranging animals for me, including a Guadeloupe anole, and a common shrew (which I understand wasn’t actually meant to be in there). I liked how a lot of the more overgrown trails were actually made accessible to the public (in contrast to those in Zurich’s Masoala hall). The visitor paths run across streams with stepping stones, bridges across waterways and ponds, and under giant waterfalls. Amazing. This is one of my favourite zoo exhibits. The animal enclosures are mostly decent too. I was lucky enough to catch the keepers weighing the newborn aardvark. Ocean is also magnificent; some really impressive tanks with interesting inhabitants. One of the main reef tanks stretches overhead and is packed with fish. Another interesting display is the largest flashlightfish tank I’ve ever seen. It’s so big that it is actually reasonably well-lit (compared to other tanks for these animals) so it’s nice to get a good look at creatures we normally only view as blinking green dots. Safari only really consists of three large exhibits; a giant cheetah enclosure, a neighbouring lion enclosure, and a giant paddock for African hoofstock (with adjacent enclosures for dik-dik, isolated waterbuck and a guineafowl aviary). Nice to look at, and I expect even nicer in the summer. There’s a café out here which overlooks the savannah, and so I expect a beer and a nice meal with the giraffe herd and rhinos in the background would be amazing. Going by the standards of the main restaurant, the meal should be very nice indeed. Rimba is a series of outdoor enclosures for Asian animals, again very nice. Not at their best at this time of year but good to see. The tigers were also very excited watching the deer in the neighbouring enclosure. Nearby is Mangrove, a small tropical house with a large number of free-flying birds including catbirds and kingfishers, which was interesting. An interesting bird collection is housed in the bird house (surprisingly enough) and in nearby aviaries. I wish I’d had more time to revisit these and see if some of the absent animals came out. A very nice range of birds are displayed here. The remaining outdoor enclosures on the way back to the main entrance are more standard zoo enclosures, although the majority are decent. (Among these standard enclosures are two duiker species, ringed seal and European jackals) I’m keen to go back and take some photos; perhaps when the weather improves.
I notice that a lot of the photo links on this thread have suddenly stopped working - is this the case for others too? Does anyone know whether this is part of a temporary technical issue?
Artis, Netherlands - February 2016 On my last day in Amsterdam I decided to visit the zoo. Vogelcommando kindly joined me in the morning and we went round together. I had previously visited the zoo in early 2010 but arrived late (and was travelling as part of a huge group), so I didn't have a great deal of time at the zoo. I'd also lost my camera two days before, so I borrowed a friend's camera which quickly ran out of battery, so it wasn't enormously helpful. This won't be a long entry, as vogelcommando has photographically documented most of our visit in the gallery. The tropical house was new to me. I liked the openness within the historic building, an interesting mix of animals too. The savannah looked good - we had a decent meal in the restaurant and re-visited the giraffe paddock several times to look for the black springbok but we didn't manage to see it - at least not while I was at the zoo. It was nice to see the sealions and penguins still mixed, and the gannets in the other penguin enclosure. The number of free-roaming poison dart frogs in the butterfly house was just incredible. A very nice touch. A pity to see the small mammal house without owl-faced monkeys - the collection here really felt a lot weaker for it. The aquarium was great, and it was here that I sadly discovered that very few of my photos from the last two days survived. I was pretty gutted for the rest of the day. Before heading to the airport, I visited Micropia. LaughingDove reviewed it nicely in his Summer thread last year - I loved the place. It's a really clever approach to the subject and the styles and approaches of the exhibits were much more versatile than I had expected.
are you posting off your phone? And which link are you using to attach into the post? It should be the one under the photo marked as "Forum code (medium)". I've fixed the missing photos. I'm not sure what you're doing but the links are actually visible as text when you look at the post as a quote (or, for me, as an edit) but the photos aren't showing up - and the link isn't actually correct anyway which is why there is no photo.
A real pitty about the lost photos devilfish but , on the other side, a good reason to pay a return-visit to Artis and Burgers and if you do this during the summertime I guess you would be even more impressed by both collections ! If you decided to do a return-trip, let me know !
Thanks. No I'm only using my laptop and these are all photos which were recently visible. That's the code I use; even on the broken images you can still click them to get to the correct page, so I'm not sure what's going on. Even TLD's attached 'award' image isn't showing up anymore.
Thanks! I'm almost out of time to return during the summer, so it might have to wait until next year. Either way, I'll let you know if I have plans!
I have found that the 'forum code (medium)' links break a little while after uploading because the text changes from "www.zoochat.com/gallery/data/1346/medium" when they are first uploaded to "s3.zoochat.com.s3.amazonaws.com/medium/" and if you copied the first link, it stops working as soon as the format is changed to the second one. For example, this is one of Devilfish's Burgers' pictures: [url =http://www.zoochat.com/162/burgers-desert-february-2016-459263][img ]http://s3.zoochat.com.s3.amazonaws.com/medium/img_87384-334717.jpg[/img][/url] And this is the most recently uploaded picture to ZooChat at the time of this post, which hasn't yet had the link changed: [url =http://www.zoochat.com/923/great-kiskadee-bioparque-la-reserva-march-459301][img ]http://www.zoochat.com/gallery/data/1346/medium/IMG_41184.jpg[/img][/url] The time on your Burgers' post and the time on your pictures shows up as the same time for me (four hours ago) and I think the links stay in their original format for a couple of hours before breaking, so I think that's your problem. Ps. I've been really enjoying this thread!
you are clever! I never would have figured that out. So, basically, don't imbed photos in posts too soon after uploading them.
Not sure why that happened, but you have earned it a few more times since I last posted it so here goes:
Bioparque la Reserva, Colombia - March 2016 I arrived into Bogota at 4am with my Bolivian flight due to take off 17 hours later. As Bioparque la Reserva only opened at 9, I tried to kill some time in the airport lounge. Meantime, the Frenchman who had sat next to me on the plane had been intrigued by my plans and stories and texted to tell me he'd like to join me on my zoo trips today. So we met up before 8 and found a taxi who would take us round for the whole day. We arrived at the park at 8.40 and were surprised to find that we could already buy our tickets. It turns out that this is a rescue centre which only keeps rescued animals, and visitors are only allowed to visit on one of several daily guided tours. I had not been aware of that. So we waited in the cafeteria area and took some time to admire the morning bird life. A couple of tanager species were the highlight. Our tour began at 9, starting with a walk across the road to watch a video about Colombia's environment (in an interesting lecture theatre) and the need for conservation. Our guide then gave a talk about opportunistic animals. When she finished the discussion we were then shown the animals displayed at the back of the room in glass-fronted enclosures. Common boas, mice, rats and cockroaches were showcased. On leaving the building I was intrigued by the calls of some small parrots and caught a glimpse of a Pyrrhura sp. being held behind the scenes The next part of the tour was a tiny herp room housing a Uromastyx sp. (the park’s only non-native wild animal), a young tortoise, Golden poison dart frog, Andean poison dart frog(?), and a couple of tarantulas. A different experience was extremely popular with the rest of the group; a walk-in rabbit enclosure. There were some young domestic rabbits in there too, and the group seemed to love chasing them. I obviously had other animals on my mind, and was standing near the gate ready to move on. Naturally, the guide got the impression that I had a fear of fluffy bunnies and so urged me to chase after them with the rest of the group. I may have indulged her. We then crossed the road back to the centre’s main grounds, walking past a couple of small outdoor tanks with tadpoles in we made it to the ‘Tropical dry forest’ house. This is effectively a greenhouse split into two sections. The first houses a few native butterfly species, along with a pair of (yellow-footed) tortoises, and a great horned owl. The guide stressed that one of the things that made this exhibit special was the lack of barriers you find in zoos. The other visitors absolutely loved this area. I, however, was much more impressed with the other half of the greenhouse: ‘Andean forest’. Filled with interesting free-flying birds, including a tinamou, aracari, amazon and Pionus parrots, caciques, thick-knees, whistling ducks, jays, a small woodpecker and a very vocal kiskadee. I went round several times taking photos, but all I saw of the woodpecker was a flash in flight which I had thought might even have been a manakin. I stayed back while the group moved on, but had no further luck with the challenging bird. I caught up with the group and later requested to re-visit the aviary but was not allowed; I was told that the flying flash was an acorn woodpecker. The group had moved on to the outdoor aviaries; one of these houses two large hawk eagles, which are separated from the public by a barrier of criss-crossing branches on all sides of the path, making the caged visitor route look a little more like a tunnel, but potentially offering excellent photo opportunities. The second aviary is a walk-through featuring lapwings, egrets and a black-crowned night heron. The tour meanders back across the site to the ‘Amazon jungle’; a walk-through aviary covered in plastic sheeting, with visitors separated from the lone harpy eagle by the same cage of branches mentioned above. We interrupted the tour to walk uphill, where a low fence encloses a few trees and a clearing; here is the daily mountain coati talk. The only known captive animals are kept here off-show but every day a short talk is given in Spanish, while a stunning little coati does a lap of the enclosed area looking for treats which are laid down by a keeper. I was fascinated by how long and mobile the tip of its snout was. An amazing animal. I took a couple of poor photos, then took a short video and a couple of shots on my ‘spare’ compact camera (so I’d still have some photos if anything happened to the other one). By the time I took a few photos on my DSLR I found that the coati had been ushered back into the pet carrier and was on its way to the off-show enclosures. I had no idea that the encounter would be so brief, lasting just a few minutes in total. We finished off the tour with a quick stop in the plant stall, a small ‘greenhouse’ featuring mostly carnivorous plants and succulents. I was a bit disappointed with the limitations of a tour; I wouldn’t have expected that any requests for back-tracking or accompanied photography at the end of the tour would be so firmly denied. As I was to experience on a few occasions on this trip – some of these zoos try to work hard to tell visitors that they are not zoos, and to distance themselves from so many similar establishments. In the process, the experience is sometimes compromised.
it's such a weird little coati! How much is it to visit for the tour of the place, and is there a bus there or only taxi?
