August 2: So Much to Do, So Little Time
The final leg of our Southwest tour brought us to Bristol Zoo, Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm, and WWT Slimbridge Wetland Center. It was another rainy day, though not quite as bad as the day before.
Bristol Zoo is a small but fantastic collection home to an excellent nocturnal house, aquarium, and invertebrate house. Highlight species include New Guinea Ground Cuscus, South American Fur Seal, Livingstone’s Flying Fox, Drill, Aye-Aye, Agile Gibbon, Sunda Wrinkled Hornbill, Socorro Dove, Meller’s Duck, Scrub Python, Malayan Box Turtle, Bourret’s Box Turtle, Keeled Box Turtle, Black Marsh Turtle, Cuban Boa, Splendid Leaf Frog, and Giant Ditch Frog. They also notably hold wild-type Budgerigar. The flying foxes are held in an excellent walk-through aviary dedicated solely to them, and it makes for probably the most extensive display for a bat I’ve ever seen, with them even including a large indoor space that can be viewed through a large window in the aviary. The nocturnal house is unique in that the first part of it is a typical nocturnal house with really good enclosures and an above average collection but then the second part is a model of the inside of a residential home and features an extensive network of interconnected enclosures for House Mouse, Brown Rat, and Black Rat. This section is also more diurnal than nocturnal but it’s part of the same building. The nocturnal house is alo unique for housing two Dasyurid species: Eastern Quoll and Kowari. With my having been to the LA Zoo just 1.5 months prior to my UK trip, this meant that I’d seen my first three Dasyurid species all in one summer! The aquarium is clearly very old and is a fantastic mix of old architecture and modern exhibitry. There are a variety of tanks representing fishes from all over the world, including a Mississippi River tank which is always a treat especially when home to the wonderful American Paddlefish. The invertebrate house is smaller and less specious than London Zoo’s, but I found the enclosures themselves to be much better done. The stars here are unexpectedly the Atlas Moth, various
Partula snails, Deserta Grande Wolf Spider, and of course the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect.
Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm is a pretty infamous collection from my understanding. For years I’d heard stories about their religious bias, makeshift enclosures, and overall crappy atmosphere, but all that aside I found it to be a pretty decent place. It’s nowhere near the top of my list for best zoos, and there are some very clear problems present, but it looks like a place working hard to better itself. The newly opened (at the time newly opened) Andean Bear enclosure was spacious and looked good, and the African Bush Elephant yards looked very large in size even if one or two of the indoor pens looked a bit off. Having the word farm in the name implied there would be a lot of domestics present, which I’m not a huge fan of, but they had species like Carpathian Red Deer, Reticulated Giraffe, Chapman’s Zebra, Northern Grey Hornbill, Lilford’s Crane, and White-Headed Vulture to keep me satisfied. Also that odd-looking GuanacoXLlama hybrid was interesting to see, even though I also dislike hybrids. I may have already discussed this with Chester’s Baringo Giraffes (more appropriately called Nubian now I think? Not that many of you would call my old name for them appropriate
) but some people may wonder why a Reticulated Giraffe would interest me when they’re supposed to be the most common giraffe species in zoos. The answers quite simple: there are no pure animals in the US. The giraffe enclosure here was small from memory, and the house wasn’t exactly great either, though I do recall a particular piece of signage differentiating the different giraffe taxa that was designed by a certain
@DavidBrown. This zoo also held a particularly nice North American mammal lifer for me in an Alabama Beach Mouse, something zoogiraffe took a lot of pleasure in finding out. The truth is this was not the first North American species I’d see for the first time during this trip (or even the day, the aforementioned paddlefish was) and it would not be the last, nor will this trip be the only time I see a North American mammal for the first time in a European zoo, but I do see the comedy in this fact. During the time of our visit, the zoo was hosting a venomous snake show by venomous snake “expert” Peter Blake. For those unaware of why I put quotations around the word ‘expert’, let me tell you about his show. For one, this show was being held directly next to the zoo’s indoor children’s playground. I mean literally next to it, there’s a single door with a large gap at the bottom only 10 or so feet away from one of the play sets and in that room there’s nine species of dangerous snakes in tanks against the wall directly next to the door. These species include Terciopelo, Western Diamondback Rattlesnake, Common Saw-Scaled Viper, Monocled Cobra, Forest Cobra, Black-Necked Spitting Cobra, King Cobra, Papuan Taipan, and Eastern Brown Snake incorrectly identified by him as King Brown Snake. Also inside the room with Blake and the snake is an untrained teenage boy sitting at a table running the show’s music and graphics. Perhaps you can place the blame for these things more on the zoo than Blake, but his actual performance still speaks for itself. Blake’s chosen method of showing off these fascinating creatures to the mainly child audience is by having them stand along the glass dividing wall and then repeated provoking the animals to the point to where they start violently striking at the children, hitting the glass wall instead. There is also the fact that, while he would be working with one species, he’d
leave other animals’ tanks open. These tanks stacked against a wall that is behind him; his back is to various opened tanks housing various venomous species that he was just provoking while he is provoking another snake in front of him. There is also a teenage boy elsewhere in this room with literally nothing but open space between him and these animals. Again, these tanks are also directly next to a door- that has a gap several inches in size at the bottom of it- that directly opens into a playground filled with running screaming children. It is a miracle amongst miracles that none of these animals ever actually escaped and hurt someone.
The WWT Slimbridge Wetland Center is a collection I was very much looking forward to visiting. They have an almost unrivaled collection of waterfowl from all over the world as well as a large collection of European amphibians and is currently the only place I know of where one can view all six species of flamingo- some very important as half of them were lifers. There’s also a very large protected wetland adjacent to the zoo and we planned to do a bit of birding afterwards. While the promise of all six flamingos certainly met expectations, I was a little disappointed to have missed the majority of amphibians and to find that the center does not hold nearly as many species as ZTL lists for them. There are still an insane amount of birds here and I definitely left with a lot of new species, but it is very clear that the zoo’s ZTL page is in need of a major cleanup. The set-up of the zoo is rather simple, several looping trails with multiple ponds filled with aquatic birds that one either looks in on or walks past within the land area of the enclosure. There’s also a walk-in shorebirds aviary, displays for aquatic mammals like Eurasian Beaver, Eurasian Water Vole, and Eurasian Water Shrew (all of whom I missed here), and a small indoor tropical aviary.
Outside of the zoos themselves, not much eventful happened as we wanted to get to each collection as quickly as possible so as to have enough time to properly see them. However, this day did end up being the one where we did fall a bit behind on time. While Bristol and Noah’s were done at a relaxed pace, Slimbridge was a bit more rushed as, after about halfway around the site, the staff began to herd us out well before the set closing time. I do believe we managed to see the entire place, but I still feel as though I didn’t get to see certain parts properly and there was no time for revisits or birding afterwards as the entire grounds closed at 5pm (pretty early if you ask me, especially compared to America’s Audubon Centers which stay open until dusk). Additionally, even without being able to explore the preserve itself, I still saw a few interesting wild birds and the main target was still seen in the form of a wild Eurasian Crane flying over the road on our way to the collection.
~Thylo
