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Hlawga Park The Zoos of Burma 3: Hlawga Park (Yangon), 27 December 2013

Discussion in 'Myanmar' started by Chlidonias, 24 Apr 2014.

  1. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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    Outside Yangon is a place called Hlawga Park. You pronounce Hlawga (at least to my ears) as if the H is silent and with the “law” to rhyme with “cow”: so “low-gah”. It has two parts, a “mini zoo” and a “safari park”. The entry price was 800 kyat (maybe NZ$1.50 or so) with an additional 500 kyat for the shuttle around the safari park. The lady at the ticket counter said you weren't allowed to walk into the safari park, you had to take the shuttle or a car, but once inside you could walk around. The shuttles only left on the hour so I had half an hour to wait and the lady suggested I go around the mini zoo in the meantime. I questioned whether half an hour would be long enough and she said yes because there wasn't much to see there. I asked if there were any small cats and she totally misunderstood my accent and replied “yes, yes, many small cages”. It turned out that despite the implications of the name “mini zoo” most of the animals were well housed here in spacious enclosures, far better than at the Yangon Zoo itself. The exception was the circular house for small carnivores which had small dimly-lit concrete cages. There weren't many animals in the zoo overall though – it is indeed a zoo which is mini! Not including the small carnivore house there are only four enclosures for mammals, two for reptiles, and a wheel-spoke aviary for birds. There is also a small museum of mounted animals which can be found in Burma, but they are in poor condition.

    The mammal enclosures are sort of a pit design but very large with the centre of each rising as a hill. The first one you come to is for macaques and is very well-planted with lots of climbing opportunities. There was a mix of rhesus, crab-eating and northern pig-tailed macaques in here. I saw one male pig-tail mating with a female crab-eating macaque. The next enclosure had a whale skeleton on the viewing deck, but I don't know what was in the enclosure itself (I'm guessing at tiger) because there weren't any signs on most of them. Next up was an Asiatic black bear in an emptier enclosure, little in the way of planting but with some climbing frames in the middle; at least it had a lot more room than the poor bears at Yangon Zoo and earth under its feet. The next mammal enclosure was another for bears, housing three Asiatic black bears and a sun bear. Between the two bear enclosures was a double pool crossed by a swing-bridge. On one side was a saltwater crocodile and on the other turtles (I don't know the species because they weren't labelled and all I saw was one head which quickly ducked underwater when it saw me). As at Yangon Zoo there were little stalls next to each mammal enclosure where visitors can buy fruit and vegetables to feed to the animals.

    The park's sole aviary was what I call a wheel-spoke aviary, basically a circular aviary divided into triangles like spokes on a wheel. These aviaries were pretty much just bare concrete with some branches. There were 6 sections to the aviary: Himalayan griffon vultures; a white-bellied sea eagle; Brahminy kites and black kites; a woolly-necked stork and a lesser adjutant; green peafowl; and one labelled for spot-necked doves and hill mynahs, of which I saw the former but not the latter, and which also contained an unlabelled male Lady Amherst's pheasant.

    The house for small carnivores was a real let-down. It was a circular house with the cages arranged around the walls inside. They were all small and dark, concrete-floored, with just a couple of branches as furniture. Really depressing. There were eleven cages in total, but seven of them were empty. The ones which were occupied (even with name labels!) held a pair of leopard cats, a common palm civet, a small Indian civet (seen only as a vague shape curled in the back), and a couple of reticulated pythons.

    The “safari park” is basically a large area of dry broadleaf forest enclosed in a low wire fence with a one-way dirt road winding through the middle in a loop around a large multi-armed lake. There are very few exotic animals in Burma's zoos so almost all the mammals introduced within Hlawga Park's boundaries are native species, namely sambar, hog deer, muntjac, wild pig and gaur. The sambar and hog deer in particular are now very numerous and easy to see. There are rhesus macaques here too which must be considered wild on the basis that they occur naturally in this region, the low fence is in no way a barrier to them, and there are probably hundreds of them here waiting for free food from the visitors. I suspect too that if they were going to be introducing macaques into the park then there would also be crab-eating and pig-tailed macaques here as well, which there aren't. Only one exotic mammal can be seen in the park, namely a common hippo in a small concrete-walled pen next to the lake. Yangon Zoo (where all these animals came from) has lots of hippos, I'm not sure why they don't let a few of them go into the lake! Some Eld's deer would make a good addition to the park too. There is a spot-billed pelican on the lake which is also an introduction, and some Chinese geese which were hanging around one of the picnic stops.

    In summary, a small place with few animals, basically sort of an overflow for Yangon Zoo. It is a good birding spot but if you don't care for birding then not really worth the trouble of getting to. As mentioned in the review for Yangon Zoo, the government announced plans at the start of 2013 to move the Yangon Zoo out here to Hlawga but nothing has happened.
     
  2. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

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    I went to Hlawgar in October 2012, as you said it is a good birding place which is the main reason I went. The safari area was ok in my opinion. It was quite good for the free ranging deer and primates. I have added photos. (only added them now because i only just became a member of Zoochat. Chlidonias' visit was more recent but I don't think much has changed.
     
    Last edited: 3 Sep 2014
  3. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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