Think that walruses and shoebills will breed better in the future It's just a thing of enclosure design.
Unfortunatelly you are not right if we are talking about walruses. There is a BBC film "Two Tonne Tusker" (you can easily google link for downloading it), and it is about problems of walrus breeding in captivity.
As far as I know, there is only one regular breeding group of walrusses in human care at the Kamogawa Seaworld in Japan-they have bred 7 Walrusses since 1994, the last one was born last year.Harderwijk has raised three calfs,Moscow one ? So I would say, there are defenitely more barbet hatched in zoos than walrusses are born, and I'm sure, it will not change in the future.Barbets are breeding well at private holders. Also shoebills, there are only a handful birds in zoos, which are able to breed.Paiiri Daiza lost one of the breeding animals, and I don't know, why the birds at tampa have bred only once-Al Wabra could be the third facillity breeding them. But there is more to breed walrusses sthan only exhibit design-if it would be that easy, all animals could be bred in zoos...and from my personal view, Hamburgs new walrus enlcoure could be better-where' the landpart ? Or the natural ground ? Strange, how could we come from walrusses to breeding barbets ?
Harderwijk - I know about two calves: Nikolai (1995) and Raisa (2004). Moskow - young female Olivia was born in 2008. Newborn calf can be consider as Moscow zoo's too because mating was some days before all walruses were transferred to Tierpark Hagenbeck. Film I mentioned above claims that there were less than 20 walrus births in American (?, maybe USA?) zoos in 80 years. Biggest problem in wrong mating season timing because of influence of wrong latitude (temperature, daylength...) probably.
So this is denitely NOT Germanys first breeding of the walrus, only the first BIRTH-a big diffrence !So hopefully Odin will mate again in Hamburg.
According to the Video on the parks Homepage, it isn't really sure, where the calf was bred, at Moscow or Hagenbeck.
6 day old Giraffe-calf jumped today on its first day out into the water of its enclosure. 5 keepers managed to bring the "little" one again out of the water and the calf is doing OK. Article ( in German ) and video : Hamburg: Giraffenbaby in Wassergraben gestrzt - Panorama - Sddeutsche.de
A second walrus has been born. https://www.facebook.com/tierpark.h...7946330616308/867961949948073/?type=1&theater
