The most comprehensive European zoo collections

You're right, Lintworm. It seems strange that Plzen has more families of mammals than several zoos have species of mammals.

 

I hadn't thought about it that way, but it is correct and a strange statistic. It is even stranger to imagine it mostly comes down to the collection mania of 1 person. I personally think Plzen has its priorities wrong (many here seem to disagree), but it shows that if more zoos were to take an interest in small mammals and showcasing true diversity, the amount of species that could have sustainable zoo populations could rise very fast.

 

Surely Walsrode, Plzen, Prague, ZG Berlin and maybe Cologne too are in. For zoos expected but less than the 5 cited, maybe Wilhelma, Villars-les-Dombes, Avifauna and Pairi and then a less obvious one being St. Primus.

Pretty sure I got most of them wrong and I can think of many others (Veldhoven for the parrots, Augsburg or Olching) but had to cut it somewhere.

 

Pafos Bird (and Animal) park has a large number of bird species, but I'm not sure if any of them are really unique, although a good many of them I have never seen other than there.

 

To be fair, the number will almost certainly go down (the question is how much though...) in the coming years, unless something extraordinary happens.

Oh yeah, the speculations about what happens when this guy leaves...one of the defying moments in Plzen's history

I do think that Plzen has some of its priorities wrong, but probably not the same you think. Plzen always seemed to me like a zoo where curators have a lot of freedom in terms of collection planning, pretty much everything was allowed unless you've brought in something "useless" that didn't really fit anywhere. In terms of small mammals, we did have some disagreements, something already changed, something did not, but nothing really became worse I would say...I do think that some species are present in far too many numbers (there is no need to have 4 breeding groups of some gerbil, 1 on show and one backup would be enough for me but hey, at least the carnivores and vultures have sometimes a special diet), but I am sort of indifferent towards it even though reducing numbers would quite help the keepers there. I even made peace with those plastic boxes some animals are kept in, because for some species, it works well.

"if more zoos were to take an interest in small mammals" oh, what could it be...This something I think that Plzen actually could be doing better - advertising those species more and try to get more zoos and public interested in them. As one wise person once said: "How are younger people supposed to build a relationship with those species if they never see them?"

 

That would entirely depend on whether the zoo was attempting to maintain the species on its own, or if other zoos were involved. If the former is the case, then maybe 4 groups would not be enough.
I can remember Jersey being applauded for having whole blocks of aviaries devoted to just White Eared-Pheasants...

 

I now see what I said might come accross as a bit too harsh and I am aware things are mostly moving in the right direction in the past years since my visit. I would love to visit again and there is a tiny bit of hope, that could be this year....

 

Oh of course, but these are species now regularly present in pet trade, so unless they are of some rare genetic line (could very well be, I wasn't looking into it that deep). That's why I used them as an example and not something like Goodman's mouse lemurs.

 

Well that would be amazing, these things are always best to discuss when examples can be provided immediately. Because even though I wouldn't say that zoo's priorities are wrong as a whole, if you divide them into smaller groups, there will be certain groups that are definitely wrong.

 

Which zoos keep the most rare bird species

It is probably unsurprising that the differences between zoos are much larger when it comes to rare birds than rare mammals. For starters there are much more bird species than mammals and interest of zoos is generally lower. Even between zoos that are interested in showing birds the differences are huge.

So which zoo keeps the rarest birds, the methodology used is the same as in the mammal post above. Again a note that only zoos for which I could find visitor data of >100.000 annual visits are included. Otherwise there is a good chance Timmendorfer Strand or Paradise Park would have made the list here.

Number one position should come at no surprise, but number 2 maybe would given the main focus is on parrots, with very few other species kept. Overall there is less Czech dominance here and it is the German zoos that generally excel. It should be noted again that this rarity says nothing about whether these zoos can sustainably keep these species. For example Walsrode has a large number of breeding pairs for many species and even though they are one of the very few holders of e.g. Blue Coua they keep a huge population. Other zoos that have invested in good breeding facilities that enable them to keep rare bird species sustainably are e.g. Loro Parque, Burgers' Zoo and Stuttgart. On the other end of the spectrum is Dvur Kralove, which is mainly on this list because it keeps small non-breeding groups (and sometimes down to single birds) of small African passerines. It should however be noted that due to confiscations and cooperation with private keepers rarity is not necessarily an indication of bad husbandry practices where the focus is solely on keeping the most rare species. Additionally some zoos cooperate very actively with ones outside of Europe, such as Zlin-Lesna.


Just behind Villars les Dombes, but of the chart, is Zoo Zürich.


When looking at birds kept at only one institution in Europe (excluding Russia and middle east), the list looks slightly different and here the effect of confiscations is apparent (Paris) as is a focus on a very specific biome or region (e.g. Torquay and Kerzers)


When zooming in on Europe's main zoos it is clear that many place at least a moderately high value on displaying an interesting bird collection, the big exception is mammall-focused Munich. It is notable that a large zoo like Wroclaw with a huge mammal and ectotherm collection does relatively less well with birds.


When zooming in on Germany, there are few surprises as 9 of the top-10 German zoos also feature in the European top-25:


The UK does much worse when it comes to keeping a diverse bird collection, had Paradise Park been included it would have looked different. Lotherton Hall and some other smaller establishments would also have made it to a UK top-10 and I imagine the many falconry centres would feature heavily. Jersey isn't part of the UK technically, but would have come in a joint 7 place with Paignton.

 

These statistics are incredibly interesting! Sadly ZTL is a pretty untrustworthy source, because then it would be even better.

 

Paphos up there, punching far above its weight at 10th

Otherwise, lots of very useful information and food for thought. As you said, Loro Parque was a surprise, as were a few others. I'm surprised Pairi wasn't further up, and the same goes for Chester. However, I would of course still much rather visit Chester for birds than Paphos, due to better aviary space etc., but Paphos has some nice little rarities.
Thank you for going to all this effort, it is a great study.

 

ZTL is more trustworthy then you give it credit for, especially among all these zoos here. Many of the zoos listed here publish annual reports with stock lists. And even though ZTL probably has an accuracy of 90% (higher for the zoos used here I think) or so that is still more than good enough to make such summary statistics very reliable indicators.

Pairi Daiza would have been higher up 10 years ago but they have significantly downgraded their bird collections (especially raptors) and focus now mostly on showy colorful tropical birds, for which they have quite some rarities still. Overall diversity is lower than at first glance though...

 

Oh yes, Pesquet's parrots, Spix's and Lear's macaws etc.
Was their raptor collection amazing or mediocre? Any rarities? I feel as if they would have something dramatic like a Harpy eagle knowing Pairi

 

Note that I only considered species, not subspecies...