Hello zoochatters! In this thread I will post some reviews and walk-throughs on german zoos I visited. Number one: NaturZoo Rheine Part one NaturZoo Rheine is a small but nice little zoo in the german city of Rheine. The zoos was founded in 1937 because a smaller town had a zoo too: Zoo Gronau. It was started as a "Heimattiergarten", a zoo with a special focus on native german species. Fallow deer, wild boar, barn owls and game birds were among the first animals of the zoo. A small monkey house and a cage for resus macaques were the only enclosures for exotic creatures. Just before the second world war, Rheine started keeping bears. After a difficult period during the war, the zoo started to keep more and more exotic creaturs, like tigers, porcupines, macaws and flying foxes. Slowly the zoo developed in the beautiful modern zoo it is nowadays. [source: NaturZoo Rheine: 1937-2012] Located in a park, Rheine has a small entrance area. It also includes some toilets and a small souvenir shop. It was sunny but my weather app predicted lots of rain, so we decided to skip the souvenir shop for now and start exploring the zoo. One thing that was clear from this point already: NaturZoo Rheine totaly deserves its name of 'nature zoo'. Besides the lush greenery, there are also lots of wild animals to see. We saw hares, rabbits, various frogs and toads, storks, herons and a host of wild songbirds. The first enclosure, just opposite to the toilets (a necessary stop on our journey ) is an enclosure for gibbons. We couldn't find them in their huge and green enclosure. Quite unfortunate, as I would love to see them use their large exhibit. The gibbons appeared to be no-shows, and were among the very few species on show we wouldn't see today. After this small dissapointment, we walked toward the large new lemur enclosure, featuring ruffed lemurs, ring-tailed lemurs and one of my favourite lemur species, the crowned lemur. According to the signs, more species will be added, including the rare mongoose lemur. A shame it wasn't on show at our visit. Althought the enclosure was clearly a walk-through enclosure, it wasn't open on our visit. Next to it was a lush and well-planted enclosure for ring-tailed coati. More interesting to me was the moat aroung the enclosure, which was teeming with frogs! After this we saw an enclosure for one of the species Rheine is famous for: gelada baboons! Three groups live in large enclosures, one shared with barbary sheep. Two of the enclosures were grassy, and it was a pleasure to see the groups of monkeys grazing, while the younger ones played in the grass. The one enclosure without grass was provided with large amount of browse to keep the baboons happy and occupied. Opposite to the baboons was a large open-topped enclosure housing a large group of chilean flamingo. The monkey house we saw next was closed (I don't know if this is normally the case), and all but one of the outside cages housed lion-tailed macaques, which also had acces to a large open enclusure with a huge climbing structure. One cage (well-planted again) houses a couple of marmosets. Next to the macaques was a smallish cage which seemed quite out of place in such a natural-looking zoo. But in it was one of the zoological highlights of the zoo: the only african wolf in Europe! I was lucky enough to see it and the golden jackall it shares its cage with the first time, because despite coming back to this enclosure two or three times more, I only saw the inhabitants that one time. Part two coming soon!