Welcome back and glad you are enjoying the German delights, let's hope there won't be another pandemic in the way, so we can finally meet up 
I see what you did there
I see what you did there
CGSwans flies north for the winter
- Thread starter CGSwans
- Start date
The zoo founder's name was Georg von Opel (related to the Opel Automobile GmbH).
Note: this one went longer than intended so is being posted as a standalone. I still intend to at least *mostly* do weekly round-ups though.
It’s been a busy week in southern Germany.
Wilhelma. This one wasn’t really in the plans for this trip, having visited in 2017 and not quite loved it with its weird hybrid of eccentric old money pleasure garden (the parrot terrace and below) and the conventional, dare I say somewhat boring zoo up on the hill.
The trouble is, my dear friend FunkyGibbon, who no longer uses this site but with whom I still zoo-chat constantly elsewhere, rates it as close to, if not his favourite zoo he’s visited. An incomprehensible choice, but I respect his opinion even when he’s clearly wrong, so after realising I was staying only about 35 minutes from Stuttgart I didn’t really have any option: I needed to put my disdain to the test and go back.
Sidebar: it turns out Deutsche Bahn schedules aren’t necessarily reliable even when the scheduled service is listed on the Eurail app *and* on the printed timetables displayed on platforms. And I don’t mean just that the service was late, I mean it didn’t exist. DB staff confirmed its non-existence but couldn’t explain why their own timetables said it did. This is not even the only time this has happened in my first week with a Eurail pass.
Anyway.
My 35 minute trip to Stuttgart took about an hour longer. In the rain. For a zoo I’d been to before and didn’t much like. This wasn’t a great start. Luckily Wilhelma offers an immediate reset to a bad start, with one of the world’s great and most unique zoo entrances - the long pathway through a series of connected greenhouses that remind the animal-centric zoo-goer that this is a botanical garden, too, and a very good one. But what joy for the animal-centric: the small tropical house off the palm house is open. It was closed in 2017 for renovation and I’d forgotten its existence, meaning that my first big surprise was a king bird-of-paradise.
I spent probably about 3 hours in the bottom half of the zoo - the aquarium and reptile house, aviary complex, jungle house and the new Australia house, among other bits and pieces. The aquarium has had a glow-up since I last visited, and what felt like a tired space seven years ago is now a deeply engaging, beautifully executed, expansive house, especially for fish. All it lacks is a knock-out centrepiece tank, but what’s there is magnificent and I spent more than an hour in there - a long time for me, as I usually keep moving reasonably quickly through a zoo.
I’m also fairly sure that most of the series of interconnected walk-through aviaries, each focusing on a different continent or biome, must have been closed in 2017 - there was a bird flu outbreak at the time - or perhaps I was simply so jaded by that relatively late stage of the trip that I just blanked it out. Either way, I now think it’s one of the better walk-through complexes in Europe, especially because it’s not just ducks and ibises (no, seven years later this has *not* stopped annoying me). Doves, parrots, starlings, finches zipping around your head - this is what a walk-through is supposed to be.
The Australia house deserves to be a destination complex for, well, anybody who isn’t from Australia. The collection is genuinely substantial now and getting better still with the imminent arrival of wombats (the exhibit map also indicates bilbies are supposed to there but I don’t think they are?). Quolls, quokkas, kowaris, golden phase brushtail possums, bettongs, tree kangaroos, sugar gliders - you can see many of our most interesting mammals here, as well as koalas.
(If you can see at all, that is. The nocturnal part of the house is the darkest I’ve ever visited in a zoo and I found it genuinely disorienting, crashing into glass at one point. I’m not helped by having early stage cataracts but I think there’s scope for adjustment here.)
Gosh, for someone who said he didn’t want to write in depth, I am going on a bit, aren’t I? I’ll keep the rest brief because this post is already on track to go from being one to two.
At this point, I was ready to reappraise Wilhelma, but I do stand by my previous criticism of the more or less open plan section for mostly larger mammals. It does feel like a different - and lesser - zoo than the eccentric’s garden below. Funky says he loves the ape house - I have a different, but equally ‘concrete’ view of brutalist architecture.
I still think, as I did seven years ago, that if indoor quarters for animals are going to be accessible to visitors then more thought needs to go into aesthetics, but equally I’ve come to appreciate how, on a quiet day, house access can offer uniquely close encounters with animals, as I enjoyed with a one-horned rhino.
I finished the zoo with the parrot terraces. I don’t love these exhibits in theory - nearly all of them could and should be larger for the species they house - but as a confirmed psittacophile I do love that they are here, with a great species lineup (headlined by what I think is the only remaining kaka outside New Zealand) in a setting that perfectly encapsulates Wilhelma. It’s still a weird place, but I like it a lot more than I used to.
It’s been a busy week in southern Germany.
Wilhelma. This one wasn’t really in the plans for this trip, having visited in 2017 and not quite loved it with its weird hybrid of eccentric old money pleasure garden (the parrot terrace and below) and the conventional, dare I say somewhat boring zoo up on the hill.
The trouble is, my dear friend FunkyGibbon, who no longer uses this site but with whom I still zoo-chat constantly elsewhere, rates it as close to, if not his favourite zoo he’s visited. An incomprehensible choice, but I respect his opinion even when he’s clearly wrong, so after realising I was staying only about 35 minutes from Stuttgart I didn’t really have any option: I needed to put my disdain to the test and go back.
Sidebar: it turns out Deutsche Bahn schedules aren’t necessarily reliable even when the scheduled service is listed on the Eurail app *and* on the printed timetables displayed on platforms. And I don’t mean just that the service was late, I mean it didn’t exist. DB staff confirmed its non-existence but couldn’t explain why their own timetables said it did. This is not even the only time this has happened in my first week with a Eurail pass.
Anyway.
My 35 minute trip to Stuttgart took about an hour longer. In the rain. For a zoo I’d been to before and didn’t much like. This wasn’t a great start. Luckily Wilhelma offers an immediate reset to a bad start, with one of the world’s great and most unique zoo entrances - the long pathway through a series of connected greenhouses that remind the animal-centric zoo-goer that this is a botanical garden, too, and a very good one. But what joy for the animal-centric: the small tropical house off the palm house is open. It was closed in 2017 for renovation and I’d forgotten its existence, meaning that my first big surprise was a king bird-of-paradise.
I spent probably about 3 hours in the bottom half of the zoo - the aquarium and reptile house, aviary complex, jungle house and the new Australia house, among other bits and pieces. The aquarium has had a glow-up since I last visited, and what felt like a tired space seven years ago is now a deeply engaging, beautifully executed, expansive house, especially for fish. All it lacks is a knock-out centrepiece tank, but what’s there is magnificent and I spent more than an hour in there - a long time for me, as I usually keep moving reasonably quickly through a zoo.
I’m also fairly sure that most of the series of interconnected walk-through aviaries, each focusing on a different continent or biome, must have been closed in 2017 - there was a bird flu outbreak at the time - or perhaps I was simply so jaded by that relatively late stage of the trip that I just blanked it out. Either way, I now think it’s one of the better walk-through complexes in Europe, especially because it’s not just ducks and ibises (no, seven years later this has *not* stopped annoying me). Doves, parrots, starlings, finches zipping around your head - this is what a walk-through is supposed to be.
The Australia house deserves to be a destination complex for, well, anybody who isn’t from Australia. The collection is genuinely substantial now and getting better still with the imminent arrival of wombats (the exhibit map also indicates bilbies are supposed to there but I don’t think they are?). Quolls, quokkas, kowaris, golden phase brushtail possums, bettongs, tree kangaroos, sugar gliders - you can see many of our most interesting mammals here, as well as koalas.
(If you can see at all, that is. The nocturnal part of the house is the darkest I’ve ever visited in a zoo and I found it genuinely disorienting, crashing into glass at one point. I’m not helped by having early stage cataracts but I think there’s scope for adjustment here.)
Gosh, for someone who said he didn’t want to write in depth, I am going on a bit, aren’t I? I’ll keep the rest brief because this post is already on track to go from being one to two.
At this point, I was ready to reappraise Wilhelma, but I do stand by my previous criticism of the more or less open plan section for mostly larger mammals. It does feel like a different - and lesser - zoo than the eccentric’s garden below. Funky says he loves the ape house - I have a different, but equally ‘concrete’ view of brutalist architecture.
I still think, as I did seven years ago, that if indoor quarters for animals are going to be accessible to visitors then more thought needs to go into aesthetics, but equally I’ve come to appreciate how, on a quiet day, house access can offer uniquely close encounters with animals, as I enjoyed with a one-horned rhino.
I finished the zoo with the parrot terraces. I don’t love these exhibits in theory - nearly all of them could and should be larger for the species they house - but as a confirmed psittacophile I do love that they are here, with a great species lineup (headlined by what I think is the only remaining kaka outside New Zealand) in a setting that perfectly encapsulates Wilhelma. It’s still a weird place, but I like it a lot more than I used to.
Still struggling to catch up…
I did something very out of character in Karlsruhe: three zoos in one day. The only time I can remember doing this before was combining Singapore Zoo, River Safari… sorry, “River Wonders”, and Night Safari on one of my Singapore trips, which was certifiably crazy. In Karlsruhe, it works because everything is pretty small.
The first stop was my reason for coming to Karlsruhe - the ‘Vivarium’ exhibit at the grandly-named State Museum of Natural History. Calling it the ‘Vivarium’ doesn’t quite sit right with me, since more than half the displays are actually aquariums. But I quibble.
I cannot emphasise enough what magnificent value this place is. It costs €5 and for that price you get a solid, if somewhat dated traditional natural history museum with the usual hits (though without the classic dinosaur wing), as well as a reptile house and small aquarium that is, pound for pound, up there with the very best that Europe has to offer.
While the overall display standard is consistently excellent, there was one tank in particular I came for: the moment I learned there was a 160,000 litre coral reef in Karlsruhe, the city went on my list to visit. The tank is, quite simply, exquisite to the point of perfection. I was chatting to an aquarist (who ignored my multiple apologies for taking up his time and continued to talk, I think because he was so pleased an Australian had turned up and enjoyed the tank so much) who was at pains to point out that the coral was a ‘garden’ that couldn’t look like that in nature. I understand, but this garden is so close to the idealised tank of my dreams that I sat soaking it all in for about 45 minutes.
I have less positive feelings about Karlsruhe Zoo, which is a fine enough but thoroughly unremarkable place. The zoo property is 22 hectares in size, but don’t let this fool you - well over half of it is an ornamental lake and formal gardens with no animal exhibits, which are all clustered to one side of the property. It means the zoo is much less substantial than it first appears, and while there are good things here and there - a reasonably nice tropical house including a walk-in bat cave is the clear standout - I don’t really have much to say about it, and I’ve resolved not to strain myself to find things to write about places I just don’t feel that strongly about.
Perhaps the best thing Karlsruhe Zoo has to offer isn’t at the zoo at all, but at its ‘dependency’ (the zoo’s word, in signage) in a large park on the other side of the rail tracks. Walk half an hour, into a large forest park, and you will find a very weird place called Tierpark Oberwald, which consists of simple, massive forest glade paddocks for various hoofstock (plus an owl exhibit). It’s free, has no gate and therefore no closing time, and when I arrived it was golden hour, the sun was pouring through the trees and it was just me, a handful of joggers and some very lucky ungulates. And yes, I patted a moose.
I did something very out of character in Karlsruhe: three zoos in one day. The only time I can remember doing this before was combining Singapore Zoo, River Safari… sorry, “River Wonders”, and Night Safari on one of my Singapore trips, which was certifiably crazy. In Karlsruhe, it works because everything is pretty small.
The first stop was my reason for coming to Karlsruhe - the ‘Vivarium’ exhibit at the grandly-named State Museum of Natural History. Calling it the ‘Vivarium’ doesn’t quite sit right with me, since more than half the displays are actually aquariums. But I quibble.
I cannot emphasise enough what magnificent value this place is. It costs €5 and for that price you get a solid, if somewhat dated traditional natural history museum with the usual hits (though without the classic dinosaur wing), as well as a reptile house and small aquarium that is, pound for pound, up there with the very best that Europe has to offer.
While the overall display standard is consistently excellent, there was one tank in particular I came for: the moment I learned there was a 160,000 litre coral reef in Karlsruhe, the city went on my list to visit. The tank is, quite simply, exquisite to the point of perfection. I was chatting to an aquarist (who ignored my multiple apologies for taking up his time and continued to talk, I think because he was so pleased an Australian had turned up and enjoyed the tank so much) who was at pains to point out that the coral was a ‘garden’ that couldn’t look like that in nature. I understand, but this garden is so close to the idealised tank of my dreams that I sat soaking it all in for about 45 minutes.
I have less positive feelings about Karlsruhe Zoo, which is a fine enough but thoroughly unremarkable place. The zoo property is 22 hectares in size, but don’t let this fool you - well over half of it is an ornamental lake and formal gardens with no animal exhibits, which are all clustered to one side of the property. It means the zoo is much less substantial than it first appears, and while there are good things here and there - a reasonably nice tropical house including a walk-in bat cave is the clear standout - I don’t really have much to say about it, and I’ve resolved not to strain myself to find things to write about places I just don’t feel that strongly about.
Perhaps the best thing Karlsruhe Zoo has to offer isn’t at the zoo at all, but at its ‘dependency’ (the zoo’s word, in signage) in a large park on the other side of the rail tracks. Walk half an hour, into a large forest park, and you will find a very weird place called Tierpark Oberwald, which consists of simple, massive forest glade paddocks for various hoofstock (plus an owl exhibit). It’s free, has no gate and therefore no closing time, and when I arrived it was golden hour, the sun was pouring through the trees and it was just me, a handful of joggers and some very lucky ungulates. And yes, I patted a moose.
Sadly I missed this one on my own recent travels, due to the traditional German tendency to close museums on Mondays! I'll get back to Karlsruhe eventually, and probably only do the museum and Tierpark Oberwald next time unless something pressing has changed/arrived at the zoo.
We thoroughly enjoyed Oberwald too - not merely for the captive wildlife, but also for the surprisingly large array of wild birds which we were able to observe and listen to... including my first wild European Golden Oriole!
In which I continue to try to play catch-up in this thread.
I’m not sure what to think about my visit to Augsburg. When you plan a big trip like this, it’s so much easier on paper to add zoos than to cut them: Augsburg is, after all, Bavaria’s third largest zoo, in a world heritage-rich city (beautiful, by the way), and was always in my head as one of the ones that was never quite going to fit into my 2017 trip, but a place I wanted to check out one day.
I’ve now checked it out and, alas, found I don’t love it. To be clear, I don’t think that’s necessarily due to any great flaws with Augsburg, and I’m not trying to discourage anybody from visiting. It has a decent sized collection in attractively planted grounds, but like many mid-tier German zoos is living with some antiquated infrastructure. At some point in the next 10-20 years I suspect that will force a reckoning of sorts, but for now it’s getting along fine. I just didn’t love the place.
Aside from the dated but well furnished (for the birds) bird house and some attractive waterfowl ponds (I suspect Augsburg has a habit of sticking some ducks in what might otherwise be empty enclosures), it doesn’t have the characterful smaller exhibits or knock-out aesthetics for big mammals that its Bavarian neighbours both excel at.
It also loses something tangible, I think, by having a single loop route through the zoo (I was told maps were unnecessary and unavailable for this reason). To me, such a design is like when Apple or Facebook rolls out a new feature that some Silicon Valley boffin has calculated might save the average person 17 seconds per day and then they impose it on all users, whether they want to be ‘helped’ in such a way or not. It might be an in-theory improvement, but some ‘inefficiency’ in life is a good thing. Just let me to find my own way through the zoo!
Luckily, I returned on Sunday to a zoo I like much better. I have a sense I rate Munich more highly than most, and allowed myself to second-guess my initial assessment in 2017 - perhaps I had moved through it too quickly, because I had visited on a holiday, the crowds were intense and I was feeling a little under the weather. So I went ready to be disappointed this time.
And I wasn’t! Munich isn’t the most intrinsically interesting zoo, with its overall strong focus on big mammals meaning this was another relatively quick (roughly 4.5 hours) visit. The area of the zoo that includes the ape house and aquarium suffers from intense overcrowding (admittedly I went on a Sunday: I suspect I’m destined never to see Hellabrunn on a quiet day). Thankfully that sense of chaos doesn’t extend outside the relatively few indoor facilities.
I remember loving in 2017 how the zoo makes extensive use of water - not just stagnant moat barriers but living water courses. Coupled with mature vegetation and a sense of history (encapsulated by the continued presence of the Heck breeds), Munich has a patina. There’s moss growing on the rocks not because some consultant said to glue it there, but because the zoo has been around long enough for it to grow, and has let it.
Maybe I rate Munich more highly than anyone else, and I’ll never claim to be one of the more knowledgeable posters here when it comes to the taxonomic rarities of a collection or the finer points of husbandry. But I know a zoo that’s simply a pleasant place to be when I go to one, and Munich is exactly that. It’s somewhere I’d love to have as a home zoo, where I’m not looking for anything in particular on a visit other than to stop by some favourite
One final thing. I’m really, really struggling to write and I’m not sure whether I’m going to persist with trying for much longer - please don’t judge too harshly if this thread does indeed go quiet. Aside from that, I’m having a wonderful time.
I’m not sure what to think about my visit to Augsburg. When you plan a big trip like this, it’s so much easier on paper to add zoos than to cut them: Augsburg is, after all, Bavaria’s third largest zoo, in a world heritage-rich city (beautiful, by the way), and was always in my head as one of the ones that was never quite going to fit into my 2017 trip, but a place I wanted to check out one day.
I’ve now checked it out and, alas, found I don’t love it. To be clear, I don’t think that’s necessarily due to any great flaws with Augsburg, and I’m not trying to discourage anybody from visiting. It has a decent sized collection in attractively planted grounds, but like many mid-tier German zoos is living with some antiquated infrastructure. At some point in the next 10-20 years I suspect that will force a reckoning of sorts, but for now it’s getting along fine. I just didn’t love the place.
Aside from the dated but well furnished (for the birds) bird house and some attractive waterfowl ponds (I suspect Augsburg has a habit of sticking some ducks in what might otherwise be empty enclosures), it doesn’t have the characterful smaller exhibits or knock-out aesthetics for big mammals that its Bavarian neighbours both excel at.
It also loses something tangible, I think, by having a single loop route through the zoo (I was told maps were unnecessary and unavailable for this reason). To me, such a design is like when Apple or Facebook rolls out a new feature that some Silicon Valley boffin has calculated might save the average person 17 seconds per day and then they impose it on all users, whether they want to be ‘helped’ in such a way or not. It might be an in-theory improvement, but some ‘inefficiency’ in life is a good thing. Just let me to find my own way through the zoo!
Luckily, I returned on Sunday to a zoo I like much better. I have a sense I rate Munich more highly than most, and allowed myself to second-guess my initial assessment in 2017 - perhaps I had moved through it too quickly, because I had visited on a holiday, the crowds were intense and I was feeling a little under the weather. So I went ready to be disappointed this time.
And I wasn’t! Munich isn’t the most intrinsically interesting zoo, with its overall strong focus on big mammals meaning this was another relatively quick (roughly 4.5 hours) visit. The area of the zoo that includes the ape house and aquarium suffers from intense overcrowding (admittedly I went on a Sunday: I suspect I’m destined never to see Hellabrunn on a quiet day). Thankfully that sense of chaos doesn’t extend outside the relatively few indoor facilities.
I remember loving in 2017 how the zoo makes extensive use of water - not just stagnant moat barriers but living water courses. Coupled with mature vegetation and a sense of history (encapsulated by the continued presence of the Heck breeds), Munich has a patina. There’s moss growing on the rocks not because some consultant said to glue it there, but because the zoo has been around long enough for it to grow, and has let it.
Maybe I rate Munich more highly than anyone else, and I’ll never claim to be one of the more knowledgeable posters here when it comes to the taxonomic rarities of a collection or the finer points of husbandry. But I know a zoo that’s simply a pleasant place to be when I go to one, and Munich is exactly that. It’s somewhere I’d love to have as a home zoo, where I’m not looking for anything in particular on a visit other than to stop by some favourite
One final thing. I’m really, really struggling to write and I’m not sure whether I’m going to persist with trying for much longer - please don’t judge too harshly if this thread does indeed go quiet. Aside from that, I’m having a wonderful time.
Glad you enjoyed Munich so much. This zoo doens not have an single enclosure that is among the world's best, yet is a very good zoo, and I think many Zoochatters rank this zoo highly .
It cannot use height differences to build exciting enclosures, it is not a classical garden crammed with old buildings, there's no symmetrical landscaping, no (sub)tropical palm trees or large greenhouses, but it is nonetheless full of character with its large cageless enclosures that are embedded in an almost perfectionist manner in the beautiful wooded floodplain landscape of the Isar, with its English-style landscaped grounds, wild open woodland and, last but not least, the omnipresent water that can be seen and heard everywhere.
The entire park is peppered with local biodiversity, from adders over woodpeckers to badgers, dormice and orchids.
Hellabrunn Zoo is a zoo that pleases from the first step to the last, preferably to be visited on a weekday in a dreadfull hot summer, when the combination of alluvial forests and fast-flowing water provide much-needed cooling.
Augsburg may indeed disappoint although of course the bird lover will find something to his liking there. The new Himalayan complex looks promising based on the drawings, wonder what it will really be like.
It cannot use height differences to build exciting enclosures, it is not a classical garden crammed with old buildings, there's no symmetrical landscaping, no (sub)tropical palm trees or large greenhouses, but it is nonetheless full of character with its large cageless enclosures that are embedded in an almost perfectionist manner in the beautiful wooded floodplain landscape of the Isar, with its English-style landscaped grounds, wild open woodland and, last but not least, the omnipresent water that can be seen and heard everywhere.
The entire park is peppered with local biodiversity, from adders over woodpeckers to badgers, dormice and orchids.
Hellabrunn Zoo is a zoo that pleases from the first step to the last, preferably to be visited on a weekday in a dreadfull hot summer, when the combination of alluvial forests and fast-flowing water provide much-needed cooling.
Augsburg may indeed disappoint although of course the bird lover will find something to his liking there. The new Himalayan complex looks promising based on the drawings, wonder what it will really be like.
I didn’t plan on Basel being my first stop in Switzerland, but immediately after crossing the border from Germany my German phone number and mobile data, which I’d acquired only after great effort and a little bit of factual obfuscation of my place of residence, cut out. It turns out that free data roaming is not one of the aspects of pan-European solidarity that the Swiss have opted into. So, I went to Basel on my first full day in Switzerland mostly because I could also duck across the border back into Germany to go to Aldi.
I remember being a bit disappointed by my Basel visit in 2017. It was my second of what I perceived then to be Europe’s major heavyweight zoos, and after not loving Beauval either I worried that I’d made a mistake focusing that trip on zoos as much as I had (a revelatory first visit to Zurich the following day set that to rights). This return visit basically confirmed my existing opinion that Basel is a very good, yet still overrated place. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but Basel’s 13 hectares feel crowded together in a way that Frankfurt’s 11 don’t, despite both having a relatively full roster of ABCs (though Frankfurt doesn’t try to do rhinos *and* elephants, as Basel does).
Where Basel does excel, though, and is perhaps a world-leader is in renovating and repurposing old buildings. I had already seen the Etosha House in 2017, but either the Gamgoas House is new or was closed on my previous visit, and the Bird House has been completely redone. Both are successes, the bird house stunningly so. It is now a genuine highlight of the zoo, even if it does lull you into a false sense of security only to smack you in the face with a walk-through for Waldrapp ***ing bin-chickens on the way out. And if the zoo keeper who warned me I was about to be subject to a simulated tropical drenching is reading this, danke schön!
Next up was a venture to Bern, for the first really highly-anticipated ‘new’ zoo of the trip: the Bern Animal Park (this translation of the name appears from signage to encompass both the Dahlzohli and the Bear Park, and I will therefore use it).
Every now and then there’s a zoo with multiple theoretical ways to get there, but only one acceptable one. For Taronga, even if one is staying in North Sydney, as I have, with a direct bus route to the zoo, the only way to properly get there is to travel to Circular Quay and board a ferrry across the harbour. At Helsinki Zoo, even though the island has been desecrated since my visit by the construction of a direct tram line, again only a ferry will do.
In Bern, for those who are physically able, the only way to go is to first visit the Bear Park (a spectacular exhibit overlooking the river, by the way) then to follow the Aare River around to the zoo itself. I suspect you have to come from a dry country with sluggish, sometimes empty creeks going by the name of ‘river’ to fully appreciate the pulsating, sometimes deafening, turquoise beauty of the Aare. Bern Animal Park certainly makes full use of it with the exhibits for otters (sadly unseen) and pelicans, which are incorporated into the river itself for instant world-class status. Also, there’s a fountain by the otters for water from the river, which I can confirm is delicious and won’t kill you.
The other standout features in Bern are the best puffin exhibit I’ve seen (a walk-in aviary with the puffins, Caspian terns, a duck species I’ve forgotten and sturgeon!), and a small but well-executed tropical house, where I appreciated how the planting inside and immediately surrounding the glass vivaria was carefully matched, so that each exhibit felt immersed within the building. Oh, and two simply enormous woodland paddocks for wisent and red deer that are the equal of anything at Oberwald.
Next, the big one: Zurich, which had so beguiled and bewildered me in 2017. Unfortunately, this year’s visit wasn’t quite the same quality experience, although it had its moments. Part of the problem is that quite a lot of the zoo is currently a building site: the old row of carnivore exhibits is gone, to be replaced some time next year by “Panterra” (sic), a set of rotating exhibits for tigers, lions and snow leopards. The wolves have also exited the collection as part of this project, and while I trust the result will be great, the loss of the former snow leopard masterpiece exhibit is most regretted.
The Pantanal aviary will occupy a simply enormous chunk of the top half of the zoo. It’s early days - the site is cleared but nothing is constructed - but I struggle to understand how it will take *four years* to build what amounts to a big aviary. Half of the Exotarium is also gone, being re-cast as the ‘Research Station’. The net effect of all these developments is that there isn’t a lot currently to see in the top half of the zoo.
What is there is somewhat disappointing. The Australia House, new since 2017, is a rare Zürich misfire; an outback themed exhibit for emus, koalas, red-necked wallabies, rainbow lorikeets and Exuma Island iguanas. Of those, only emus actually live in the Outback and the iguanas aren’t Australian at all. It’s a particularly baffling choice because it’s not as if there’s a shortage of Australian lizards available in Europe. Has anyone in Zurich heard of a bearded dragon?
The ape house is still the ape house. As excited as I am for the Pantanal (and I think it will be magnificent), it’s hard to justify why it should be a higher priority than fixing this eyesore, which is so out of keeping with the rest of the zoo.
The bottom half - what I’ll call the ‘national parks’ exhibits because each is named after a park in Africa or Asia - is still one of the great exhibit ensembles in the world. I didn’t love Lewa (also new since 2017), but that was probably weather related - I was battling significant rain, yet again, and an empty Savannah is just… a lawn. The fake baobabs are ugly though.
The real focus for my visit was Masoala. I didn’t spend enough time there in 2017, because I really struggled with the contrast between equatorial Madagascar inside and *literally snowing* Switzerland outside. It was still cool last week, but the precipitation was at least liquid in form. This time I was determined to make the most of what I think is the most technically-perfect zoo exhibit in the world. I tried and failed to spot lemurs, but saw plenty of birds, and two flying foxes, three chameleons and more day geckos than I could count isn’t so bad a haul, is it?
That’ll do for tonight. Will try to get up to date in the next one.
I remember being a bit disappointed by my Basel visit in 2017. It was my second of what I perceived then to be Europe’s major heavyweight zoos, and after not loving Beauval either I worried that I’d made a mistake focusing that trip on zoos as much as I had (a revelatory first visit to Zurich the following day set that to rights). This return visit basically confirmed my existing opinion that Basel is a very good, yet still overrated place. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but Basel’s 13 hectares feel crowded together in a way that Frankfurt’s 11 don’t, despite both having a relatively full roster of ABCs (though Frankfurt doesn’t try to do rhinos *and* elephants, as Basel does).
Where Basel does excel, though, and is perhaps a world-leader is in renovating and repurposing old buildings. I had already seen the Etosha House in 2017, but either the Gamgoas House is new or was closed on my previous visit, and the Bird House has been completely redone. Both are successes, the bird house stunningly so. It is now a genuine highlight of the zoo, even if it does lull you into a false sense of security only to smack you in the face with a walk-through for Waldrapp ***ing bin-chickens on the way out. And if the zoo keeper who warned me I was about to be subject to a simulated tropical drenching is reading this, danke schön!
Next up was a venture to Bern, for the first really highly-anticipated ‘new’ zoo of the trip: the Bern Animal Park (this translation of the name appears from signage to encompass both the Dahlzohli and the Bear Park, and I will therefore use it).
Every now and then there’s a zoo with multiple theoretical ways to get there, but only one acceptable one. For Taronga, even if one is staying in North Sydney, as I have, with a direct bus route to the zoo, the only way to properly get there is to travel to Circular Quay and board a ferrry across the harbour. At Helsinki Zoo, even though the island has been desecrated since my visit by the construction of a direct tram line, again only a ferry will do.
In Bern, for those who are physically able, the only way to go is to first visit the Bear Park (a spectacular exhibit overlooking the river, by the way) then to follow the Aare River around to the zoo itself. I suspect you have to come from a dry country with sluggish, sometimes empty creeks going by the name of ‘river’ to fully appreciate the pulsating, sometimes deafening, turquoise beauty of the Aare. Bern Animal Park certainly makes full use of it with the exhibits for otters (sadly unseen) and pelicans, which are incorporated into the river itself for instant world-class status. Also, there’s a fountain by the otters for water from the river, which I can confirm is delicious and won’t kill you.
The other standout features in Bern are the best puffin exhibit I’ve seen (a walk-in aviary with the puffins, Caspian terns, a duck species I’ve forgotten and sturgeon!), and a small but well-executed tropical house, where I appreciated how the planting inside and immediately surrounding the glass vivaria was carefully matched, so that each exhibit felt immersed within the building. Oh, and two simply enormous woodland paddocks for wisent and red deer that are the equal of anything at Oberwald.
Next, the big one: Zurich, which had so beguiled and bewildered me in 2017. Unfortunately, this year’s visit wasn’t quite the same quality experience, although it had its moments. Part of the problem is that quite a lot of the zoo is currently a building site: the old row of carnivore exhibits is gone, to be replaced some time next year by “Panterra” (sic), a set of rotating exhibits for tigers, lions and snow leopards. The wolves have also exited the collection as part of this project, and while I trust the result will be great, the loss of the former snow leopard masterpiece exhibit is most regretted.
The Pantanal aviary will occupy a simply enormous chunk of the top half of the zoo. It’s early days - the site is cleared but nothing is constructed - but I struggle to understand how it will take *four years* to build what amounts to a big aviary. Half of the Exotarium is also gone, being re-cast as the ‘Research Station’. The net effect of all these developments is that there isn’t a lot currently to see in the top half of the zoo.
What is there is somewhat disappointing. The Australia House, new since 2017, is a rare Zürich misfire; an outback themed exhibit for emus, koalas, red-necked wallabies, rainbow lorikeets and Exuma Island iguanas. Of those, only emus actually live in the Outback and the iguanas aren’t Australian at all. It’s a particularly baffling choice because it’s not as if there’s a shortage of Australian lizards available in Europe. Has anyone in Zurich heard of a bearded dragon?
The ape house is still the ape house. As excited as I am for the Pantanal (and I think it will be magnificent), it’s hard to justify why it should be a higher priority than fixing this eyesore, which is so out of keeping with the rest of the zoo.
The bottom half - what I’ll call the ‘national parks’ exhibits because each is named after a park in Africa or Asia - is still one of the great exhibit ensembles in the world. I didn’t love Lewa (also new since 2017), but that was probably weather related - I was battling significant rain, yet again, and an empty Savannah is just… a lawn. The fake baobabs are ugly though.
The real focus for my visit was Masoala. I didn’t spend enough time there in 2017, because I really struggled with the contrast between equatorial Madagascar inside and *literally snowing* Switzerland outside. It was still cool last week, but the precipitation was at least liquid in form. This time I was determined to make the most of what I think is the most technically-perfect zoo exhibit in the world. I tried and failed to spot lemurs, but saw plenty of birds, and two flying foxes, three chameleons and more day geckos than I could count isn’t so bad a haul, is it?
That’ll do for tonight. Will try to get up to date in the next one.
Arctic Tern rather than Caspian, but nonetheless a very nice species - the ducks were Harlequin Duck, another rather choice oddity.
I believe two other species were brought in from Australia for this exhibit but lasted only days (in the case of the thorny devils) or months (in the case of the perentie) - I suspect the zoo may have hopes of importing further individuals for the latter, however, as the outdoor exhibit I suspect they used to inhabit is still vacant and surrounded by a variety of perentie-specific theming and signage!
Is there actually real confirmation this ever happened (the Moloch being exported from Australia), or just "someone told me" type stuff.
I visited Zurich and Bern immediately before COVID (my only Swiss zoos) and agree pretty much agree with everything you said, although Lewa was under construction. The Australia House at Zurich is just ridiculous. Why is it that European and American zoos just assume Australia = desert. I can't understand how the same people who put so much care into Masoala could produce such rubbish. I loved Bern and thought the tropic house was a delight, and of course the other exhibits you describe. Watching puffins "fly" though the water in their huge exhibit was wonderful.
The ZTL entry for the species specifies the date of import, along with the dates that the two individuals concerned died, and states that the source is direct email communication with the ZTL admin - which is somewhat more concrete than an unsourced claim or one lacking in detail, and hopefully means that @Animal can confirm whether the information came directly from the zoo or not.
Certainly I recall hearing about the (alleged) import at the time, and own a guidebook for Zurich published in summer 2016 which lists the species within the collection.
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Plenty of Pogona vitticeps and henrylawsoni are kept as pets in Switzerland; perenties, aka the intended original inhabitants of the exhibit, are, however, much harder to come by. Still, Varanus gouldii or varius might have been a slightly better choice than the iguanas.
I, for myself, do not consider any Australian zoo exhibit complex a truly Australian zoo exhibit complex if there's not at least one venomous critter inside...
Well done, Prague; at least you got it right.For the same reason everyone seems to assume that the whole of Germany = Bavaria. You can "thank" decades of medial representation (Mad Max, Crocodile Dundee, Australia etc.) for making non-Australian zoos believe that their visitors think of Australia = Outback.
So apparently they are just running amusement parks, not scientific institutions. Good to know. One less argument against the anti-zoo lobby.
There is no point in building immersive exhibits if they just misrepresent the habitat of the animals they present. My favourite koala exhibit was at Nagoya Zoo over 30 years ago. The koala sat on it's perch in an air conditioned room surrounded by by a field of orchids in flower. At least it did not lie to it's visitors.
Crocodile Dundee and Australia were set n the Top End savanna. Can't remember Mad Max enough to say where it was set.
Anyway, what are you saying? You don't all live in fairytale castles high up in the alps, and spend your days downing copious quantities of beer?
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The Australia house kept Perentie for multiple years as well as another small monitor lizard and shingleback skinks. But in the new masterplan this house is slated to become a house focused on endangered island species. Hence why it already has these iguanas and Savu python... But as it is still Australian-themed it is somewhat of a weird look...
The snow leopard exhibit will be saved and I don't think it will look all to different from what it was, but there will be several connecting tunnels and probably some other adaptations
The Swiss did opt into this one, but not completely. For some reason it depends on your mobile provider whether you have free data roaming in Switzerland or not.
I think everyone is thinking this. It almost looks like a vanity project of the relatively new director who wants to make a mark. When he was in Wuppertal they also designed a somewhat similar, but far smaller S-American aviary for macaws and flamingo. Maybe he just wanted to see what it could look like if you can play Zoo Tycoon in the sand box mode
You would probably like the new Australian house in Stuttgart, which seems to come pretty close with matching Australian habitats (including plants) to their animals.
Sounds great!
If you can *see* in there, which I couldn’t.
I wasn't sure how to find photos easily in the gallery (I just used the search word Australia and only got five photos), but these two look nice for Koala and Blue-tongue Skinks respectively: