The zoo is now open.
I went to the new zoo yesterday; very impressed, it's well laid out & makes good use of the natural features of the site. There are squirrel monkeys & coatis living on two islands in the lake, with, I'm told, more to come as there are a couple of islands still awaiting their inhabitants, and there were a couple of empty enclosures as well.
There's also a large selection of birds there, including some very friendly amazon parrots, in fact a lot of the Amazons seem to have just been grouped together for the sake of convenience, similarly the macaws. I don't know if the zoo is intending to breed from it's parrots, it's a bit late for this year & I saw no signs of nestboxes, but I hope if they do they seperate the species to avoid hybrids. The amazons caused a little amusement when some of the visitors found it amazing that a parrot could talk.
In fact most of the animals seem very friendly & reacted to the human visitors. There was a pair of North American otters there which kept boucing to the front of their pen, & the tapirs kept coming over to their fence to sniff at their visitors.
The area where the cats are kept is most impressive, set into woodland & with plenty of scope for climbing. At the moment they have jaguars, pumas & ocelots, I did hear rumours af jaguarundi as well.
There's some interesting waterfowl there as well, but the lake they are on is os big you may have trouble seeing them.
The tropical house is good, there were some species of bird in there, unfortunately unlike the rest of the zoo there were no identification labels to let you know what they were. If I had one criticism of the zoo however it would be the fish displays, the tank with the pacu in looked very gloomy & you could barely see the fish & the tank with the red bellied piranha seemed full of algae. Otherwise it looked very good, although a few South American butterflies flying around would have finished it off nicely.
It's definitely worth visiting, my minor critiques aside.