As mentioned, I finally managed to obtain a Grutt Pass from the Tokyo National Museum the next day. However, because it was raining reasonably heavily I chose to begin the morning at the museum. For those of you whose travel interests extend to art and culture, I thoroughly recommend it.
I ended up spending a good 3 hours or so there, meaning I only got to the zoo around 1PM. Ueno was a relatively small zoo, I thought, with lots of ABCs and it's open until 5. Should be pretty easy.
Well, this is an ABC zoo where A is for aye-aye, B is for bushbaby and C is for crocodile lizard, so that didn't prove to be the case at all and I ended up very rushed after 4, when animals started to go off display and indoor sections started to close. I thus had to return later in the trip.
Here's a link to the zoo map for those unfamiliar with the lay-out.
https://www.tokyo-zoo.net/english/ueno/img/map_ueno_english.pdf . I'm writing this without having (recently) read any other accounts, so as to keep from being influenced by others. So my apologies if I cover a lot of the same ground as previous posts, but hopefully I at least have a different take to, say, Devilfish.
I started at the main gate and turned left. The Eurasian otter enclosure is ugly but functional - a theme I will keep returning to in this and other Tokyo Metropolitan Zoos reviews. By that I mean that it was terrible to look at, but it provided a lot of usable features for the animals. Just like the pelican enclosure at Sunshine Aquarium, there is an extension at the front that provides access to water that's a good metre or so deep, and the original portion has more water and a range of rocks, logs and other furnishings to provide a complex environment.
I wasn't expecting Ueno to be much to look at, but I felt this was a good start. The best zoos will be both attractive and functional for animals. Good zoos will, confronted with a choice, always go for functionality first. Ueno's part of the way there on both counts, though it does have further to go.
After entering I turned left, thinking I could knock off the East Garden reasonably quickly. There's a run of new aviaries next to the otters that don't appear on that map. They're all wood-and-wire jobs with sparse vegetation, but hopefully that'll develop over time. I see now that I've neglected to note down the species, but I remember brush turkeys, a couple of different pheasants and I think pigeons and owls. Sorry I can't be more specific.
The giant panda exhibit was actually pretty good - I've seen the ones in Adelaide, Singapore, Atlanta, Washington and San Diego now, and I'd put it ahead of Atlanta and probably San Diego too. The outdoor portions are quite similar to San Diego in size and furnishings.
The Japanese bird house was made up of five aviaries with glass fronts, but only three were occupied - the largest, for wading birds, was empty and another was undergoing reconstruction. The others were actually very high quality little habitat aviaries. One had Lidth's jay and white-breasted waterhen (not seen). Another had ruddy and common kingfishers, Japanese robin (not seen), olive-backed pipit, red-flanked blue tail and Japanese bush warbler. The third had a whole bunch of little brown jobs - too many to write down although I was kinda amused to see tree sparrows not only in the aviary but listed on the boards, meaning they were actually an exhibited species!
There's a few more Japanese bird aviaries outside (lists available on request, this post will be too long if I try to list *everything*). One had a jay mixed with Japanese squirrels - in addition to the main aviary there was an overhead wire tunnel linking it to a second space, enclosed around the base of a large tree. Cool.
Next came prairie dogs - again, I really liked this exhibit. An active colony of perhaps 20 or so, and they had the burrow set up like a naked mole-rat exhibit, so you could see what was going on inside. At this point I was really pleasantly surprised with Ueno.
That satisfaction took its first knock with a series of identical monkey cages, housing black and white colobus, De Brazza's monkey, Japanese macaque, white-faced saki and black-handed spider monkey. All are rectangular wire and concrete jobs - perhaps 4 metres across and maybe a little more high. They're ugly and will always be ugly, but more ropes and deep straw beds, coupled with scatter feeds would do an awful lot to improve the space for the monkeys. It's not clear to me why this hasn't been done.
I expected the elephant enclosure to be poor, and it is. To be fair, it's no poorer than Melbourne's was 12 years or so ago, and as I will discuss later there's reason to hope that this isn't a permanent situation. There were either 2 or 3 (I forget) Sri Lankan elephant cows in one small concrete pen, and a bull in a yet-smaller pen. There's no real scope for Ueno to build a modern elephant enclosure on site, but I don't know if Tokyo residents are ready to accept the premise of an elephant-less zoo.
It was around this point that I began to realise I would be pressed for time, so I bypassed the lion, tiger, gorilla and gibbon enclosures for the time-being (and ultimately only saw them with animals on display on my second visit. I did notice in passing that the Brazilian tapir exhibit was great - perhaps the best I've seen for the species. A moderately generous and lushly planted land section, and a long, wide and deep moat for swimming in.
The tapir exhibit is part of the same complex. It turns out that this section is the best part of the zoo, and is clearly among the newest. All six of the enclosures (two for gorillas) would sit comfortably in a good quality Western zoo. Some *might* be renovated old grottoes - they were constructed out of concrete sorta-kinda-mock-rock, but there was again very lush vegetation. The gibbons (white-handed) were sharing with a peacock and Edward's pheasant, which was a new and interesting mix.
Also in this area is a small nocturnal house, labelled on the map as 'bats'. There's nothing particularly special inside, just the bats (Leschenault's rousette), a leopard cat, lesser mouse deer, Bengal and Pygmy slow loris... oh yeah, and two Chinese pangolins. Almost forgot.
The bird house is close to the same standard as the one at Washington, with a couple of exceptions. There are three large aviaries and several smaller ones on the second floor, which also offers canopy-level viewing into two of the three main ones. Letting down the side here was a tiny, pet store-style cage holding a red-shouldered macaw, and a weirdly out of place indoor enclosure for Southern tamandua. Happily, it moves (or rather, is moved) in and out of another small outdoor pen, so it's getting some regular stimulation between the two.
Also in this area is a bird-on-a-stick style pen for obviously flightless citron-crested cockatoos, and another run of reasonable outdoor aviaries. Across a plaza is a series of clearly quite old cages that have several crane species as well as hamerkops and a Secretary bird. Nothing special here, but also not terrible. As an aside, there were very few parrots either at Ueno or the other two Tokyo-region zoos I have visited. Very odd.
Rounding out the East Garden, we have a typical concrete mountain for Japanese macaques, a series of bear pits and the 'Corridor of Ice and Snow'. The bear pits house a Malayan sun bear, a Hokkaido brown bear and Japanese black bear - all solo artists. There's also a couple of small pens that have actually been carved out of the bear grottoes, for small-clawed otters and Japanese badgers. All of the bears here showed signs of stereotypy on my first or second visit - pacing in the black and sun bears (more pronounced for the black) and the brown was compulsively rubbing his back against the wall when I first went, although I didn't see this the second time.
The Corridor is made up of an outdoor pool, for California sea lions (including a very large bull) and a common seal, and a large polar bear enclosure. Compared to the pinniped prisons I'd see at Sunshine Aquarium this was a pleasant surprise. Nothing spectacular but decent spaces for both swimming and basking. I was also happy with the polar bear enclosure, concrete monstrosity though it might be.
It's a legacy of an older time, both for Ueno and for zoos around the world, but they've got an excellent deep pool (complete with underwater viewing) and a small adjunct to the enclosure has grass. The first time I visited the bears were in together, the second time one as shut in the grassy yard.
Onto the West Garden. As mentioned, on my first visit I was very rushed here, so I lavished time on it the second time around. The first thing you see after making the somewhat gruelling, largely uphill walk via overpass above the road that bisects the zoo is a red panda exhibit. This is positioned so that you are still on the ramp down into the West Garden when you first get a tree-height view. Very good. There's also a small pen for crested porcupine down below.
The feature that dominates the West Garden is the absolutely massive pond. It takes up well over a hectare, I think, and I'm sure there's more the zoo could do with the space but I'd hate to see it drained. It currently houses Pelicans and cormorants, and is liberally covered with water lilies. It looks great. To the South of the pond is an area closed for construction, but I couldn't discern what is being built.
The newest and, for me, most exciting part of the West Garden is the Aye-Aye Forest. The Madagascan complex actually starts on the opposite side of the pond, with a ring-tailed lemur island. It has a fake baobab tree that's pretty poorly executed, but hey, the thought was there.
Outside the aye-aye building is a nice big aviary-style enclosure for ruffed lemurs and a smaller one for a fossa, with a weird gravel substrate. Inside is a glass-fronted enclosure for gentle lemurs, another for greater hedgehog tenrecs and radiated tortoises, and a small one for lesser hedgehog tenrecs. And no fewer than four exhibits for aye-ayes.
At first it was a soul-crushing disappointment. Despite being inside, the first enclosure I saw was lit up like daylight, and the staff member there to enforce quiet indicated the aye-aye was in its box asleep. Damnit.
Then I moved further into the building and found that the rest were nocturnal exhibits populated by very active aye-ayes! I love the way they constantly seemed to transition between being the right-side up and then upside down, seemingly just because they can. They're a lot bigger than I imagined. Another bucket-list species down.
Despite being relatively new, this building has the same sparse, unadorned concrete construction as much of the rest of the zoo. I suspect that despite being government owned the Tokyo zoos don't have a lot of capital funding, and they are rightly emphasising usable spaces for animals over pretty adornments.
After the aye-aye and I had had our moment, it was time for a very, very quick pace through the rest of the zoo (and a more leisurely one a week later). I'm going to start moving more quickly in this review as well, because this is getting very long and no doubt boring to read.
Ignoring the children's zoo entirely, there are a couple of netted aviaries for African penguins, flamingoes and shoebill storks (at least three individuals). The flamingo aviary was labelled as housing greater flamingoes, but they were definitely not. I *think* they were Caribbeans, but I'm not an expert and could well be wrong.
The reptile house is very good, with lots of interesting species. Like the new reptile house I saw in Atlanta, it's set up as a tropical greenhouse, with a tree canopy overhead. The first and most exciting exhibits are a pair of pools for Japanese giant salamanders. This is my first good look at the species and they are, indeed, giants. There's a very good amphibian collection here generally, including lots of Japanese species. There's a separate room specifically for natives that looks like it was added to the complex later.
The small mammal house on this side of the zoo caught me off guard with its size, with a lower floor nocturnal house that I didn't expect. I have a list of species that will be provided on request at some later point, but the highlight is two spectral tarsiers.
Finally, there's a bunch of small grottoes housing mostly large species in okay to manifestly inadequate conditions. A surprise here for me were my first aardvarks, which aren't listed on the map. They were in their night den (which is open to the public), curled up together, so it wasn't a particularly decent look but probably enough to count it, just. Maned wolves have two tiny cages and there's a mud pit housing a red river hog (which won't mind over much, I don't think).
It's clear to me that Ueno is trying to grapple with the legacy of being (re)built in the 1950s, which wasn't a very good time for zoo design anywhere. They're also wrestling, I think, with how to be a small urban zoo and whether that's compatible with housing a full suite of charismatic megafauna. For now they seem to have hit on a compromise to try to maximise space for at least some of their animals: one river hippo, one zebra, one giraffe, one okapi.
There are, however, still two black rhinos and about four Pygmy hippos, which together have arguably the worst conditions of any animals in the zoo. One of the Pygmy hippo enclosures consisted of the night den, about 5sq metres of outside land space and a putrid pool the size of a large bathtub. The rhino yards are similarly very, very small. The zebra is in with two Barbary sheep in a caged-in yard more appropriate for a mid-sized cat or dog species.
These last enclosures are simply not good enough, and are pretty urgent welfare issues for the zoo to solve. The good thing is that I suspect the management know it, which is at least a start. I was, overall, happier with Ueno than I expected. It's a zoo with some features that are really inadequate and a lot that's average rather than great, but I am very encouraged by what I took to be the newest developments. It's a work in progress, but it is indeed in progress.
