Chester Zoo Game

Wonderful! I quite liked your rule of 'no blind guesses', so let's use it for this round as well!
Here's mine:

Neither red nor white, neither banker nor explorer. What am I?
 
Wonderful! I quite liked your rule of 'no blind guesses', so let's use it for this round as well!
Here's mine:

Neither red nor white, neither banker nor explorer. What am I?
Gonna go out on a limb and say red river hog. It's not exactly red it's orange, and while it has white elements on its fur it isn't full white.
 
Wonderful! I quite liked your rule of 'no blind guesses', so let's use it for this round as well!
Here's mine:

Neither red nor white, neither banker nor explorer. What am I?
I'm thinking the two parts of the riddle refer to the animal's name in two parts.

So Ruddy Shelduck.

Ruddy is neither red nor white but a combination.

I think Shelduck is a playing on "shell banks" (banks with no physical presence) and Sir Francis Drake (as in, duck is not drake).
 
@Charlie Simmomds, that would've been a rather funny one with 'river' referring to the explorer, and 'hog' to the banker. :p However, it's not the right answer!

@Chlidonias, very well thought out! However, that also isn't the species I was thinking of.

Both very creative suggestions, but I'm afraid I took a much different approach when thinking of the riddle!
 
my next thought is that the "neither banker nor explorer" may be a reference to Walter Rothschild who came from a banking family but wasn't a banker himself, and had dozens of explorers working for him as collectors but wasn't an explorer himself.

However I'm stumbling over the first part of the clue. So I'll weakly suggest "neither red nor white" means blue (as in the missing part of "red, white and blue") and connect that to the face-mask of the Rothschild's Mynah.
 
The Rothschild part fits almost a bit too perfectly, however "nor white" wouldn't quite work out!

A small hint might be that I mentioned 4 things it isn't.
 
The Rothschild part fits almost a bit too perfectly, however "nor white" wouldn't quite work out!
I know, but the only other option I could see would have been Rothschild's Giraffe and I couldn't get anything red/white for that!
 
is it a black-and-gold howler monkey? It has a four part common name containing 2 colours.
 
I'll try Green and Black Poison Dart Frog because the opposites of white and red are green and black (red/green are complementary) and it also has golden in the scientific name.

The second part of the riddle I'm less sure about, but if you use Dendrobates tinctorius auratus as the scientific name then it has two other professions in the name - tree climber and dyer.
 
All very nice guesses, but all unfortunately incorrect.
As this seems to be a bit harder than anticipated, I'll give another riddle-type clue:

The red, the white, the banker and the explorer are all green with envy of the species we're looking for.
 
Could all the hints refer to different starling species, meaning we are looking for a green one, like the emerald glossy starling?
 
Could it be the inca jay, they are mainly green in colour and are the envy of people due to the fact that they are hard to find.
 
Neither red nor white, neither banker nor explorer. What am I?
it isn't the Red-crested Touraco. It isn't the White-crested Touraco. It isn't Schalow's Touraco. It isn't Fischer's Touraco.

It is the Violaceus Touraco.

That was an obscure sort of riddle!
 
You got it! I agree, the riddle was quite unorthodox. I went for a riddle that tied the "Chester Zoo" aspect of the game into things a bit better, since without knowing they keep those 5 species one wouldn't be able to solve it.

For others: "red" referred to red-crested turaco, "white" referred to white-crested turaco, "banker" referred to Schalow's turaco, named after Hermann Schalow, a German banker, and "explorer" referred to Fischer's turaco, named after Gustav Fischer, a German explorer.
Additionally, the "green with envy" line stated that those 4 species (all of one genus, "Tauraco") were green whereas the other wasn't, and was therefor 'special' in a sense.

I'm very pleased by the answers I got! A lot of things that unintentionally fit really well.
 
Last edited:
I liked your riddle. I couldn't figure it out for ages of course! But from lintworm's starling post I thought I had it for pochards (red-crested pochard, white-eyed pochard, Baer's pochard maybe, then got stuck). Pigeons sort of got halfway as well.

I don't get the "green with envy" clue though.
 
Back
Top