The Parc Zoologique et Forestier (in English: the Zoological Park and Botanic Gardens) opened in 1972. Wikipedia claims it to have over 700 animals of over 130 species. I had posted a few photos in the Gallery which my sister had taken back in about 1990 but they didn't really give much of an idea of what the zoo was like, so I was very interested in visiting the collection when I made a short two-week trip to New Caledonia in August this year. The zoo is situated in the northern part of New Caledonia's small capital city Noumea, on top of a hill which gives good views out over the surrounding countryside and ocean. Few tourists explore this country without a rental car at their disposal, but even if you are without one then the zoo is still readily accessible by taxi, the Noumea Explorer bus, and "Le Petit train" the latter two of which do a circuit of the city for the tourists. If by oneself then the Noumea Explorer bus is the "cheapest" option (1500 Pacific Francs for a day ticket - New Caledonia is not a cheap holiday destination!) but if there are two or more people then a taxi is far more cost-effective. The zoo itself is just 400 Pacific Francs for entry.
The zoo is largely a bird park, the only mammals being monkeys, deer and a few farm animals. It is divided into a native area to the left of the entrance and an exotic area to the right, with a small botanic gardens separating them; there are however quite a few random exotics scattered through the native section as well. The exhibits are quite spread out over a largish area. On entry I was told that each half of the zoo would take about 1.5 hours to visit, but I ended up spending 3.5 hours in the native area and 5 hours in the zoo overall, much longer than I had anticipated.
Directly behind the entranceway as you come into the zoo is an exhibition building called Maison de la Nature ("House of Nature"), in which was a temporary exhibit about invasive species. It was all in French but, coming from another island nation over-run with introduced pest animals, I got the gist of the displays quite easily. Most were of the poster-on-the-wall variety, but there was also an aquarium in this building for tilapia and red-eared terrapins.
The native area of the zoo is called "Vallee des endemiques", where you can "discover the terrestrial biodiversity of New Caledonia and the exceptional richness of the fauna" - or something like that: my French is not excellent! The enthusiasm of the sign is quite warranted however because many of the endemic birds of this island are displayed here. My main reason for coming here was in fact to try and obtain some good photos of the endemic birds because while I had seen most of them in the wild they weren't very accommodating with regards to being photographically documented! This part of the zoo has quite a confusion of paths, making it necessary to keep doubling back and continuously consulting the map to ensure nothing is missed. The first aviary one encounters is a double one housing New Caledonian imperial pigeons on one side and white-throated (metallic) pigeons on the other. The New Caledonian imperial pigeon is reputedly the largest arboreal pigeon in the world (their specific name is goliath) and they certainly are impressive birds. On the other side of the path is a kagu pen. The kagu is a flightless bird rather reminiscent (to me) of a cross between a seagull and a spur-winged plover (Vanellus miles). Its wierd because while being very unusual it also has a sort of "familiar" air to it. Its the national bird of New Caledonia and even non-birding folk hear about it. It is featured on the 1000 Franc note, on business logos, on tourist pamphlets, everywhere, and even the small local kids at the zoo were excitedly calling out "cagou!" when they saw it. I think many people come to the zoo just to see the kagu there. What I didn't realise until I'd done a circuit of the native area and came back to this point was that the kagu pen was actually a walk-through enclosure! In fact it was four walk-through enclosures! How many zoos can say they have a walk-through kagu enclosure?! In the interests of accuracy I should actually say that really only two of the enclosures were open walk-through pens, the third was a pen that could be looked into from the boardwalk of one of the other pens, and the fourth enclosure was a walk-in aviary (when you entered you just stood on a platform in front of the door rather than walking through the whole aviary). This last aviary also held a variety of other local birds including various pigeons and parrots. The Noumea Zoo is very actively involved in a breeding programme for kagu, from which offspring are released into the wild. There are roughly 1000 wild kagu, over half of which inhabit the Riviere Bleue national park. They are threatened mainly by dogs. As I can't speak French and relatively few New Caledonians admit to speaking English, I couldn't ask anyone at the zoo about the breeding programme but one of the signs said that since 1978 they have bred over 100 kagu (and also that the bird has only had legal protection since 1977!!). There were about eight birds on display but I don't know if they have off-display breeding pens as well.
Further on from the kagu pens is a very small aviary for a lone striated starling, and then the parakeet aviaries displaying New Caledonian parakeets (Cyanoramphus saissetti, split from the NZ red-crowned kakariki to which they are similar but more yellowish), a pair of horned parakeets, a lone Ouvea horned parakeet, and a couple of individuals of the local subspecies of rainbow lorikeet. I was particularly interested in the Ouvea parakeet, as these are extremely endangered and I didn't have the time to get to the one small island where they live (to the east of New Caledonia). Following on from these were aviaries for green-backed white-eyes, red-throated parrotfinches, cloven-feathered doves, sacred kingfishers, red-bellied fruit-dove, barn owls, and a nice group of Nicobar pigeons - these last birds aren't native to New Caledonia, or even found anywhere nearby, but the sign explains their presence by noting that a related native species (Caloenas canacorum) is known from subfossil bones, having died out soon after human colonisation a few thousand years ago. The path wanders down to a couple of very large ponds (or small lakes, depending on one's point of view) and then you have a choice of three different directions. One path has more aviaries for native birds, as well as the three local fruit bats (the endemic Pteropus ornatus and P. vetulus and the native P. tonganus). The birds here are New Caledonian crow, New Caledonian friarbird and peregrine falcon (which I couldn't see), as well as exotic Java sparrows. The aviaries for the crows and friarbirds were made of heavy green mesh which not only made photography impossible but made even simple viewing extremely difficult.
One of the other paths leads past the ponds to a wierd dead-end exotic section, consisting of a budgie aviary, a row of small parrot aviaries (grand eclectus, little corella and yellow-bibbed lory), a reasonably large cage for pig-tailed macaques, and a completely enclosed (fenced-over) pen for Japanese red-crowned cranes. I counted 6 cranes here, the enclosure was pretty large, but there was no point where you could actually approach it to see them - you had to view from a distance. A purple gallinule running across the path reminded me that whilst at the zoo I was also supposed to be trying to find the local subspecies of nankeen night heron that live wild here. So I looked up and sure enough there was one perched in a eucalyptus tree above me. There turned out to be a lot of the herons nesting around the lakes in the bamboo stands. The purple gallinule is a common bird throughout the Old World - in New Caledonia it is called poule sultane which I suppose can be translated as "the chicken who thinks he's a sultan"
The third path heads off around the larger lake, at one end of which is a small flock of flamingoes. I counted only eight of them, which I think was the lot, and while my sister's earlier photo shows them loose at the lake now they are confined inside a small fenced-over pen, half in the water and half on land. Like the Japanese cranes there is no approach to the pen - in fact the viewing point is a very long way from the pen, and it did make their presence seem a bit pointless as an exhibit - but given the attitude of a lot of the local Kanak visitors to the animals at the zoo I'd say that's probably for the best. The path continues wandering round the lake margin, passing aviaries for silver pheasants and New Caledonian imperial pigeons, with another dead-end detour with aviaries for great argus, pied imperial pigeons, a pair of wrinkled hornbills, and a group of variously-coloured Indian ringneck parakeets. Round the other side of the lake is a very small and ugly aviary for a hill mynah, a very small aviary for a lone great Indian hornbill, and some very small and ugly aviaries for pheasants (ringneck, Lady Amherst's and Reeves'), before you finally get to the Vivarium which is a row of glass-fronted exhibits for (mainly) native reptiles. These are very interesting of course, mostly being endemic species. Here you can see (or not see, as most are nocturnal) Rhacodactylus leachianus, R. ciliatus, R. sarasinorum, R. auriculatus, Gehyra vorax, Phoboscincus garnieri, the Pacific tree boa (Candoia bibroni), and down the end three exotic species (eastern water dragon, green iguana and radiated tortoise). The terrariums here weren't overly large but they were well furnished and quite attractive.
The aviaries in the native section are mostly pretty uninspiring, sometimes quite unattractive and sparsely furnished but others were very well planted, they were usually of an adequate size (some were what I would call quite large, but conversely others seemed very small), but none are what I would consider exceptional. Several aviaries were made of the heavy green mesh I mentioned earlier which was not a good construction choice. The signage was very good, in three languages.
In the middle of the zoo, between the native and exotic sections is the "mini farm". I didn't enter here but saw some rusa deer from outside the fence and I understand there are some domestic animals such as goats and rabbits in there. On either side of the farm was an aviary, for the endemic white-bellied goshawk in one and the native whistling kite in the other.
Its a bit of a walk through the botanic gardens to the exotic section where the aviaries are randomly dotted about. First up are two very small aviaries, one for a pair of red-and-yellow barbets and the other for Senegal parrots (amusingly called "Perroquet youyou"), then a cluster of parrot aviaries for various macaws and amazons. The sun conure aviary is very nice, probably the nicest in the zoo, with a somewhat odd but interesting glass-sided tunnel going through the middle. Just after these are two average-sized but ugly cages for Geoffroy's spider monkeys and black-capped capuchins, which I suspect are cast-off animals from Australian or New Zealand zoos. There are patas monkeys a bit further on which (according to an old post in one of the Zoochat threads somewhere) came from Taronga Zoo in Australia. The ostriches were nowhere in evidence although the sign on their enclosure warned that they bite (the only animals I didn't see in the zoo were the ostriches and the peregrine falcon). There's another small lake in this part of the zoo, again with an aviary built partly over the water's edge. This nice aviary houses African spoonbills, scarlet ibis, demoiselle cranes and Carolina wood ducks. Next to it is an aviary for sacred ibis, while on the lake shores itself can be seen Eurasian white pelicans and grey-necked crowned cranes. A bit futher on again are aviaries for African grey parrots and peach-faced and Fischer's lovebirds (lovebirds are called "inseperables" in French!!!). Apart for a very randomly-placed aviary for domestic ringneck doves these are the last of the exhibits as the path wanders all the way back to the "mini farm".
The exotic section is really sort of odd with a heavy emphasis on African birds (presumably all imported from France) but with everything just sort of scattered here and there about the place with no real cohesion. The macaw aviaries are big fairly ugly things which look rather like old monkey cages, but the sun conure aviary is very nice and looks very new (but is very bare inside). I'm guessing the monkeys are there more to attract the locals, while the endemic birds on the other side of the zoo are mainly for the foreigners while hopefully also educating the locals who visit to see the monkeys! Overall its a very nice little zoo that I did enjoy a lot, and if you're a bird person then the native section is heaven.
Photos to be uploaded soon.
The zoo is largely a bird park, the only mammals being monkeys, deer and a few farm animals. It is divided into a native area to the left of the entrance and an exotic area to the right, with a small botanic gardens separating them; there are however quite a few random exotics scattered through the native section as well. The exhibits are quite spread out over a largish area. On entry I was told that each half of the zoo would take about 1.5 hours to visit, but I ended up spending 3.5 hours in the native area and 5 hours in the zoo overall, much longer than I had anticipated.
Directly behind the entranceway as you come into the zoo is an exhibition building called Maison de la Nature ("House of Nature"), in which was a temporary exhibit about invasive species. It was all in French but, coming from another island nation over-run with introduced pest animals, I got the gist of the displays quite easily. Most were of the poster-on-the-wall variety, but there was also an aquarium in this building for tilapia and red-eared terrapins.
The native area of the zoo is called "Vallee des endemiques", where you can "discover the terrestrial biodiversity of New Caledonia and the exceptional richness of the fauna" - or something like that: my French is not excellent! The enthusiasm of the sign is quite warranted however because many of the endemic birds of this island are displayed here. My main reason for coming here was in fact to try and obtain some good photos of the endemic birds because while I had seen most of them in the wild they weren't very accommodating with regards to being photographically documented! This part of the zoo has quite a confusion of paths, making it necessary to keep doubling back and continuously consulting the map to ensure nothing is missed. The first aviary one encounters is a double one housing New Caledonian imperial pigeons on one side and white-throated (metallic) pigeons on the other. The New Caledonian imperial pigeon is reputedly the largest arboreal pigeon in the world (their specific name is goliath) and they certainly are impressive birds. On the other side of the path is a kagu pen. The kagu is a flightless bird rather reminiscent (to me) of a cross between a seagull and a spur-winged plover (Vanellus miles). Its wierd because while being very unusual it also has a sort of "familiar" air to it. Its the national bird of New Caledonia and even non-birding folk hear about it. It is featured on the 1000 Franc note, on business logos, on tourist pamphlets, everywhere, and even the small local kids at the zoo were excitedly calling out "cagou!" when they saw it. I think many people come to the zoo just to see the kagu there. What I didn't realise until I'd done a circuit of the native area and came back to this point was that the kagu pen was actually a walk-through enclosure! In fact it was four walk-through enclosures! How many zoos can say they have a walk-through kagu enclosure?! In the interests of accuracy I should actually say that really only two of the enclosures were open walk-through pens, the third was a pen that could be looked into from the boardwalk of one of the other pens, and the fourth enclosure was a walk-in aviary (when you entered you just stood on a platform in front of the door rather than walking through the whole aviary). This last aviary also held a variety of other local birds including various pigeons and parrots. The Noumea Zoo is very actively involved in a breeding programme for kagu, from which offspring are released into the wild. There are roughly 1000 wild kagu, over half of which inhabit the Riviere Bleue national park. They are threatened mainly by dogs. As I can't speak French and relatively few New Caledonians admit to speaking English, I couldn't ask anyone at the zoo about the breeding programme but one of the signs said that since 1978 they have bred over 100 kagu (and also that the bird has only had legal protection since 1977!!). There were about eight birds on display but I don't know if they have off-display breeding pens as well.
Further on from the kagu pens is a very small aviary for a lone striated starling, and then the parakeet aviaries displaying New Caledonian parakeets (Cyanoramphus saissetti, split from the NZ red-crowned kakariki to which they are similar but more yellowish), a pair of horned parakeets, a lone Ouvea horned parakeet, and a couple of individuals of the local subspecies of rainbow lorikeet. I was particularly interested in the Ouvea parakeet, as these are extremely endangered and I didn't have the time to get to the one small island where they live (to the east of New Caledonia). Following on from these were aviaries for green-backed white-eyes, red-throated parrotfinches, cloven-feathered doves, sacred kingfishers, red-bellied fruit-dove, barn owls, and a nice group of Nicobar pigeons - these last birds aren't native to New Caledonia, or even found anywhere nearby, but the sign explains their presence by noting that a related native species (Caloenas canacorum) is known from subfossil bones, having died out soon after human colonisation a few thousand years ago. The path wanders down to a couple of very large ponds (or small lakes, depending on one's point of view) and then you have a choice of three different directions. One path has more aviaries for native birds, as well as the three local fruit bats (the endemic Pteropus ornatus and P. vetulus and the native P. tonganus). The birds here are New Caledonian crow, New Caledonian friarbird and peregrine falcon (which I couldn't see), as well as exotic Java sparrows. The aviaries for the crows and friarbirds were made of heavy green mesh which not only made photography impossible but made even simple viewing extremely difficult.
One of the other paths leads past the ponds to a wierd dead-end exotic section, consisting of a budgie aviary, a row of small parrot aviaries (grand eclectus, little corella and yellow-bibbed lory), a reasonably large cage for pig-tailed macaques, and a completely enclosed (fenced-over) pen for Japanese red-crowned cranes. I counted 6 cranes here, the enclosure was pretty large, but there was no point where you could actually approach it to see them - you had to view from a distance. A purple gallinule running across the path reminded me that whilst at the zoo I was also supposed to be trying to find the local subspecies of nankeen night heron that live wild here. So I looked up and sure enough there was one perched in a eucalyptus tree above me. There turned out to be a lot of the herons nesting around the lakes in the bamboo stands. The purple gallinule is a common bird throughout the Old World - in New Caledonia it is called poule sultane which I suppose can be translated as "the chicken who thinks he's a sultan"
The third path heads off around the larger lake, at one end of which is a small flock of flamingoes. I counted only eight of them, which I think was the lot, and while my sister's earlier photo shows them loose at the lake now they are confined inside a small fenced-over pen, half in the water and half on land. Like the Japanese cranes there is no approach to the pen - in fact the viewing point is a very long way from the pen, and it did make their presence seem a bit pointless as an exhibit - but given the attitude of a lot of the local Kanak visitors to the animals at the zoo I'd say that's probably for the best. The path continues wandering round the lake margin, passing aviaries for silver pheasants and New Caledonian imperial pigeons, with another dead-end detour with aviaries for great argus, pied imperial pigeons, a pair of wrinkled hornbills, and a group of variously-coloured Indian ringneck parakeets. Round the other side of the lake is a very small and ugly aviary for a hill mynah, a very small aviary for a lone great Indian hornbill, and some very small and ugly aviaries for pheasants (ringneck, Lady Amherst's and Reeves'), before you finally get to the Vivarium which is a row of glass-fronted exhibits for (mainly) native reptiles. These are very interesting of course, mostly being endemic species. Here you can see (or not see, as most are nocturnal) Rhacodactylus leachianus, R. ciliatus, R. sarasinorum, R. auriculatus, Gehyra vorax, Phoboscincus garnieri, the Pacific tree boa (Candoia bibroni), and down the end three exotic species (eastern water dragon, green iguana and radiated tortoise). The terrariums here weren't overly large but they were well furnished and quite attractive.
The aviaries in the native section are mostly pretty uninspiring, sometimes quite unattractive and sparsely furnished but others were very well planted, they were usually of an adequate size (some were what I would call quite large, but conversely others seemed very small), but none are what I would consider exceptional. Several aviaries were made of the heavy green mesh I mentioned earlier which was not a good construction choice. The signage was very good, in three languages.
In the middle of the zoo, between the native and exotic sections is the "mini farm". I didn't enter here but saw some rusa deer from outside the fence and I understand there are some domestic animals such as goats and rabbits in there. On either side of the farm was an aviary, for the endemic white-bellied goshawk in one and the native whistling kite in the other.
Its a bit of a walk through the botanic gardens to the exotic section where the aviaries are randomly dotted about. First up are two very small aviaries, one for a pair of red-and-yellow barbets and the other for Senegal parrots (amusingly called "Perroquet youyou"), then a cluster of parrot aviaries for various macaws and amazons. The sun conure aviary is very nice, probably the nicest in the zoo, with a somewhat odd but interesting glass-sided tunnel going through the middle. Just after these are two average-sized but ugly cages for Geoffroy's spider monkeys and black-capped capuchins, which I suspect are cast-off animals from Australian or New Zealand zoos. There are patas monkeys a bit further on which (according to an old post in one of the Zoochat threads somewhere) came from Taronga Zoo in Australia. The ostriches were nowhere in evidence although the sign on their enclosure warned that they bite (the only animals I didn't see in the zoo were the ostriches and the peregrine falcon). There's another small lake in this part of the zoo, again with an aviary built partly over the water's edge. This nice aviary houses African spoonbills, scarlet ibis, demoiselle cranes and Carolina wood ducks. Next to it is an aviary for sacred ibis, while on the lake shores itself can be seen Eurasian white pelicans and grey-necked crowned cranes. A bit futher on again are aviaries for African grey parrots and peach-faced and Fischer's lovebirds (lovebirds are called "inseperables" in French!!!). Apart for a very randomly-placed aviary for domestic ringneck doves these are the last of the exhibits as the path wanders all the way back to the "mini farm".
The exotic section is really sort of odd with a heavy emphasis on African birds (presumably all imported from France) but with everything just sort of scattered here and there about the place with no real cohesion. The macaw aviaries are big fairly ugly things which look rather like old monkey cages, but the sun conure aviary is very nice and looks very new (but is very bare inside). I'm guessing the monkeys are there more to attract the locals, while the endemic birds on the other side of the zoo are mainly for the foreigners while hopefully also educating the locals who visit to see the monkeys! Overall its a very nice little zoo that I did enjoy a lot, and if you're a bird person then the native section is heaven.
Photos to be uploaded soon.
