Mega zoo tour at Netherlands

Wildpark MV does a great job focusing on native species and visitor education.


Kamelhof Sternberger Hof offers an interesting mix of activities such as moderated safari rides into the enclosures of camelids, moose, water buffalo, American bison etc., hiking with camels, wolves hybrids, llamas or reindeer and on-site youth hostel-style accommodation right next to a canoe . The owner is a larger-than-life person full of energy and ideas.
Kamelhof Sternbergerburg - Home

Timmendorfer Strand offers the bird park and a Sealife Center, but if you're already in that part of Schleswig-Holstein and have a car, I'd rather recommend you to visit Wildpark Eekholt and Haus- und Nutztierpark Warder instead.

 

I'm somehow surprised about the number of ZooChatters who do not drive. Apparently, you neither live on the countryside, have kids nor own larger animals.

 

Note that my depth perception is quite limited too, but as you know, driving is not a problem for me!

 

I was offline for many time and I only checked the Netherlands forum once I was back from my trip, looking for some info/photos about Artis.

I see that you also had to face with some bad weather. I think that we are used to have too much sunny weather where we live One of the good points of Burgers’ Zoo is that you can visit it even on rainy day and you’ll not miss many animals because weather problems as many areas of the zoo are indoors (I visited it during a thunderstorm and I was able to see almost all I wanted)

Which zoo did you liked the most? (not in terms of species you wanted to see, in general)

 

Certainly the zoo I liked most not counting the species, is Pairi Daiza. That's why is the most expensive of the list

Yes, bad weather would have been not much a problem in Artis, but it caught me in Zie-zoo and Apenheul instead. And in these places, really can be a problem for see the animals! (as happened to me).

And talking about Apenheul, it also qualifies as a unique zoo! A zoo that is totally covered in native forest and have almost no areas with clear sky visible under the dense canopy, plus is specialized in monkeys and have free-ranging species not usually used for free-ranging, it's certainly unique

 

That's kind of... unexpected. Not a bad choice in any way, just not what I expected. I would be interested to know why you rate Pairi Daiza so high.

Good to hear you enjoyed Apenheul. Though not extremely large, it among the very best the Dutch zoo landscape has to offer.

 

Well, they asked me which zoo I like most not counting the animals. And the zoo that have a more complete setting of non-animal things, most amazing exhibits, shows, etc is of course Pairi Daiza, so it's a bit of predictable.

Maybe the next most liked zoo was Best-zoo by the sensation of homemade, familiar and kindkess while being able to keeping a lot of rare species and perfectly adequate enclosures.

 

Not so predictable if you ask me (read for comparison the recent reviews of the zoo by @lintworm and myself, found here and here). The exhibits are good (from a visitor perspective), but I would say that Burgers' or Apenheul for example, have equally good or even better exhibits, though with a very different concept. The gardens are very well kept in Pairi Daiza (with the tree-fern garden being the highlight), but for example Burgers' or Rotterdam also have integrated a botanical collection within their zoos, and I wouldn't say PD's is necessarily better than those. And don't get me started on animal welfare.

Not really how I would describe them. Some are good, some are adequate, some are just acceptable and some are downright unacceptable.

 

The best exhibits are those of Burgers (in particular the Bush and Mangrove), but nobody asked me about what exhibit I liked most, but about which zoo I liked most. The gardens are certainly not a thing that make me think in Pairi Daiza as the zoo that I liked most. The tree fern garden certainly didn't impressed me at all, is just a forest of Dicksonia antarctica, half of which are dead, with just tasmanian devils at one side and a cassowary at the other side. Certainly the nearby Australian walkthrough aviary is by far much more impressing than the tree fern forest! With the tame galahs and rosellas and the red soil that makes a much more Australian feeling. The botanical collection in Burger's Bush impressed me a lot and I got a lot of photos of rare plants (I already commented about this point in my review), but nobody asked me which zoo have the best botanical representation, but which zoo I liked most as a whole. I highly doubt that Pairi Daiza staff run into animal abuse, that would be the only thing that could make animal welfare not perfect here. I can't judge Rotterdam zoo without visit it. About BestZoo, all enclosures are adequate to good. There are no just acceptable and for sure absoluely no unacceptable enclosures (except if you count the behind the scenes exhibits, that I don't saw and hence I don't know how they are). The only enclosure that caught my attention by the barren and theorical not good lookin is the tamandua building, but knowing the breeding success of tamanduas in this zoo, then for sure is an adequate enclosure - otherwise tamanduas would not breed here.

 

I was merely giving examples of factors that could influence one's appreciation of a zoo. I was wondering which factors influenced your decision to rate PD so high.

I did come across too harsh, but I hope you understand that there's a whole range between "no abuse" and "perfect welfare."

The big cats for example have enclosures that I would call barely acceptable or even unacceptable given the number of leopards they have. And instead of reducing the number of animals, only more cats have arrived or were born in recent years. They are certainly not hell-holes but I can't really call them adequate either.

Sorry, my mistake.

 

The leopards and jaguars (there are the only species of big cats here) have perfectly adequate enclosures, tough is true that I passed almost no time looking at the enclosures. Maybe the medium cats are in a slightly worst situation (lynx and serval) with long but narrow enclosures, but also not surpass the fronter of "unadequate". Lynx and serval have a dense vegetation while leopard and jaguar not, but the vegetation inside the enclosure is not a need for their welfare. The fact of that more leopards born indicates just that the enclosure is adequate - otherwise they would not breed or would do very occasionally.

 

I've got no problem with the big cat enclosures, their size is similar to a lot of other zoos I've seen.

Personally, I think the enclosures for these cats, especially the lynx, are too small and I'd hope they move to smaller species when the current inhabitants depart/die.

Whilst I don't have a problem with the enclosures I'd have to refute the often repeated claim that just because an animal breeds their enclosures are adequate. Animals have been known to breed in truly appalling enclosures (as well as not breeding in some truly great ones ) -lions used to frequently breed in (tiny) beast wagons in the days of travelling menageries.

Finally, what did you think of the truly unique Binturong "enclosure" at Best?

 

That just makes me think about the orangutans at Barcelona Zoo on its former enclosure. They breed many times, but that was by far the worst orangutan exhibit I ever seen

 

Thanks for the clarification. Good to hear that you had a good trip. No further lists are needed, just all the photos you added to the galleries up to now, including rarities I guess you made the trip to the Netherlands for like spotted skunk, scrub wallaby, sifaka etc.

I do agree with you that at least in some areas of the Artis Aquarium signages are quite worse and/or out dated.

 

Just this morning I was uploading the bad signage of the fossil and some unsigned fishes for ID, that just come to demonstrate what I said.