Here is my review of the Madagascar house from my epic road trip thread:
Madagascar! - excellent renovation job of the 1903 lion house. The spongey floor and beautiful signs (the best signage in the zoo) are outstanding, and all of the exhibits are colourful and attractive. The spiny forest section with ring-tailed and collared lemurs is unique in the zoo world just because it is so damn good, and the sifaka's were a delight in a smallish enclosure. The pair of nile crocodiles and the two fossas were fantastic to see, and the building as a whole is expertly done. Perhaps this could challenge Minnesota Zoo's "Russia's Grizzly Coast" for the AZA Exhibit Award? I'd like to see Minnesota win, as that zoo's new set of habitats is brilliant and they could use the acclaim more than the Bronx.
There are no outdoor yards for any of the animals, and the species list includes nile crocodiles, coquerel's sifakas, ring-tailed lemurs, red ruffed lemurs, collared lemurs, fossas, ring-tailed mongooses, and assorted reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates. There might be one or two species that I omitted from the overall list.
I have not visited the Bronx since the opening of this exhibit, so I speak only on the evidence of the photo, but...
While this certainly looks very nice, I do wonder about the extent to which its 'niceness' is aesthetic, and thus really only of interest to people rather than, in this case, the lemurs within. There's been a lot of criticism on this forum of, in particular, quite a number of European zoos where some quite old enclosures look pretty ugly - even though they may well provide a pretty functional home for the animals within. It does seem possibly that this photo shows a place which is the total antithesis of, say, the old carnivore house at dresden Zoo. I'm not sure which is "better".
In the hundreds of ring-tailed lemur exhibits I've seen around the world, this is the ONLY one that replicates to any degree of accuracy (visually and functionally) the actual environment ring-tails live in in nature. It is quite spacious, offers multiple levels of vertical and horizontal perches, places of visual refuge (from each other and from visitors), enrichment as created by the mix of species and visual adjacency of natural predators (mongoose), loads of UV light through the ETFE skylights, and living Madagascan plants. And it looks great and tells visitors the story of the real habitat of ring-tailed lemurs (the spiny forest of southern Madagascar), as opposed to the much more typical "lemurs let loose in a temperate forest" or "lemurs in a playground" look of most zoo exhibits of this species.
Even though I am a massive fan of the San Diego Zoo, the lemur cages there are disgraceful. Some might argue that because they have bars then the lemurs can grasp the steel and use it for climbing purposes, but in comparison to the Bronx's naturalistic, wonderful Madagascar building they pale in significance. As reduakari has pointed out, the habitats for lemurs at the Bronx are authentic and the vegetation is what lemurs would experience in their African homeland.
Let's say that with access to good outdoor exhibits for most species, this complex of exhibits might be outstanding...As it is now, the lack of such an access is regrettable.
