Auckland Zoo Te Wao Nui Review

Auckland Zoo scoops gold for Te Wao Nui in landscape awards | Scoop News

 

on the zoo's facebook they say the blue duck pair in Te Wao Nui have laid eggs:

The brown teal in the Wetlands aviary also laid a clutch recently.

 

So I visited Auckland Zoo on the 19th (best zoo in the country by a long way, and easily of world-class standard) and Te Wao Nui is amazing! It could easily be a stand-alone native collection – and if it was it would surpass by a very long way any other stand-alone native collection in the country! The only poor point about it is that there isn’t a single path through the complex, so there seemed to be a lot of random back-tracking to see everything (or maybe that was just me!). Judging by other comments in this thread there does seem to be quite a bit of moving of animals between exhibits, so my observations follow:


COAST: all the birds in the aviary were sleepy, so I only saw one sleeping NZ dotterel, one sleeping spotted shag, two sleepy little blue penguins and one little blue taking nest material into one of the boxes. The underwater viewing window for the seal pool was fantastic with nicely done theming around it. The seals were very active too.

ISLANDS: the aviary for Campbell Island teal and Antipodes parakeets was empty (with a sign saying the birds were off-display) so I didn’t go in there because it was padlocked. The lizard tanks were lushly-planted with mosses and ferns, and looked great. They held from left to right (when facing them) Duvaucel’s geckoes; Falla’s skinks; forest and Northland green geckoes; more Fallas’s skinks; and chevron skinks. The signage for these tanks was very poor, with only some of them specifically identifying the inhabitants within. The tuatara tank on the opposite wall was nice too.

WETLANDS: saw paradise duck, shoveller, grey teal (quite a few of them), brown teal, scaup, white-faced heron. There was a sign for banded rail but due to the presence of an unbelievably badly-behaved school group they were hiding. There were was no signage for pied stilt or kingfisher that I saw. The eel tank was good, but hard to see into due to reflections.

NIGHT FOREST: again ruined by the hoardes of screaming little school kids with no adult control!!! The kiwi, morepork and (frustratingly) short-tailed bats all remained unseen. The two kiwi enclosures were too small for my liking. The Archey’s frog tank is still not occupied. There are two tanks for snails (kauri and flax). They only have one cave weta left but I missed that tank anyway. The giant weta tank is now or will be very soon finished and occupied (but I didn’t notice where it would be). The fish tanks looked very nice, especially the giant kokopu was impressive. The other two tanks held black mudfish in one (not visible, unsurprisingly), and a mix of bullies, galaxiids, torrentfish and koura in the other. My only criticisms here are that the corridor is too dark when there are alcoves in the walls (where the tanks are) which makes walking into things too easy; and the doors at the end aren’t obviously for the public to go through (I think that was the entrance though and I just went in the wrong way!)

FOREST: really nice but personally disappointing in that I had just come from several days on Tiritiri Matangi and had been spoiled by birds. There was no specific signage for saddleback or kokako but just a general wattlebird sign. I think adding banded rails to the floor of the aviary would be a good idea.

HIGH COUNTRY: once again, a fantastic aviary, very nice both to look at and to walk through. I didn’t see any weka (you know, school kids!) but I did see the kea. Outside are several tanks for Otago skinks, all very visible basking on their outcrops. Rough geckoes are in a tank inside the entrance hut for the blue duck aviary. The ducks couldn’t be seen from the viewing point inside but could be seen sleeping on the far end of the pond when standing on the raised path that leads past the outside of the aviary. I saw no kakariki in the blue duck aviary and don’t recall seeing a sign for them (there were signs for both in the forest aviary though).

 

I will make some comments about the zoo as a whole in another thread, but I didn't really find anything wrong with it at all. It was almost entirely brilliant. With the caveat that NZ is limited in the number of species the zoos can display, I did find Auckland Zoo to be world-class.

Regarding Te Wao Nui, to be honest I think my perception of the "no single route" may have been due to me wanting to visit the night bit first for the bats. If I had approached it differently it may have been simpler. The sole reason for missing the kiwi and probably bats was the screaming kids (and I mean literally screaming, not just being noisy). I didn't see any reptiles in the night area. The giant weta *should* be on display by the time you visit.

I obviously worded the Wetland section badly though. I did see some eels in the tank there, right at the front, but the reflections made it a difficult tank for viewing. There aren't stilts and kingfishers in the aviary, I was just commenting on that there were no signs for them which I gather there had been previously (I read the passage back and I had made it sound like I had seen the stilts and kingfishers but hadn't seen the signs for them, which wasn't my intention sorry).

 

the kaka are in the big walk-through forest aviary.

The first time I visited Auckland Zoo (which was also the only time I had visited Auckland Zoo until last week), back in the early 90s, both kea and kaka were in horrible little concrete aviaries with almost literally nothing for them to do in there. What a marvellous difference since then!!

 

there were six eggs, all of which were pulled for incubation (I did wonder why the ducks were sitting by their pond instead of on a nest!). All are fertile which is good news.

 

awww, that's so cute!!

 

Peacock Springs in Christchurch is part of the black stilt breeding programme and release quite a few birds. The Kiwi Birdlife Park in Queenstown used to be part of this as well; I'm not sure if they still breed them, or only hold them for advocacy purposes (I'll be there later this month, so I'll find out).