This is also way too small but their was at least a gate to the rhino outdoor section. But I don't know if they let it roam around there from time to time.
Alas there is a long, currently ongoing, history of zoos largely neglecting the terrestrial needs of hippos. The tree cover makes it a bit difficult, but I measure the land area on this ancient exhibit at ~1100-1200 square feet. This is far from unusual, even in brand new exhibits.
For example my local Woodland Park Zoo, until recently, had one of the largest outdoor hippo yards I can think of in the country. Approximately ~4600sf of land area. It was shut down just this year, with our remaining Hippo Lily sent to the often exalted San Diego Zoo. Its hippo yard has a land area of 1185sf, with no access gate to any rhino yard...
This is not as isolated example. Milwaukee just this year spent 13.5 million to "upgrade" its hippos from ~3900sf, down to less than 2000. Back in 2018 Fort Worth did actually upgraded its hippos, from a paltry 700sf, to a luxurious 1700. Cincinnati Zoo is currently housing 4 hippos on 1800sf of land area, in an exhibit opened in just 2016. The current zoological ethos it seems, at least in the AZA, is to treat hippos as fully aquatic animals. This is despite hippos spending nearly half of the time terrestrially grazing in the wild.
I'm not sure which zoo did it first, maybe it was Berlin in 1997. But at some point in the early 2000s, zoos discovered what an incredible spectacle, and crowd draw, underwater hippo viewing could be. Seeing 1.5 ton mammal swim weightlessly in crystal clear water, surrounded in shoals of cichlids of every color, is truly a sight like no other. These exhibits aren't cheap to build, the powerful filtration needed to keep crystal clear water with such messy inhabitants often pushes these exhibits into the double digit millions to construct. And yet despite the cost, I cant think of a single newly constructed hippo exhibit in the past two decades that hasnt been designed around underwater viewing. And with this, the land portion of the Hippo exhibit has become an afterthought, often barely even visible to the public.
As you can probably tell, for some reason your post sent me down a rabbit hole measuring about a dozen recently constructed hippo exhibits. It is a interesting trend however, which I thought worth dissecting. Why I chose to do that in a comment, rather than a proper thread, I am now very much questioning. Too late...
You should start a thread with all this valuable information or else your comments will be buried in the gallery. I am quite impressed with what you've started!
