A Guide to the Rarities of Europe

A very nice zoo, the desert gives a great biome and backdrop for the exhibits there:). However, I don’t believe that blanfords and swift foxes are still held unfortunately…

According to this website, they still hold Blanford's. Are you sure they don't?
 
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Ooh please do - would be very interested to hear what you have to say on it.

Mostly it's just a walkthrough stocklist - that whole Northern Germany trip has a myriad notes recorded for a thread I never even started :p been meaning to at least get the onshow stocklists written up and posted as a point of interest, but so far only gotten half the Walsrode notes typed up.
 
A very nice zoo, the desert gives a great biome and backdrop for the exhibits there:). However, I don’t believe that blanfords and swift foxes are still held unfortunately…

At least the swift foxes were here in summer 2021. Impossible to see them, tough. Their exhibit was in the hornbill-marmoset-rhinoceros iguana pavilion called "Aula de la Naturaleza", its den was just in the glass viewing panel but not built to be seen - I only managed to see badly an ear of the sleeping fox.

About Blandford, the signage for 5 fox species together are to be seen in an big enclosure, just after the finish of the cat enclosure row. Here are signaged Blandford's, Ruppell's, fennec, bat-eared and swift. Given that swift, bat-eared and ruppell's have their own enclosures in different parts of the zoo and that I spent here a lot of time looking in every corner of the exhibit to only see a fennec, I doubt that the signage is updated for this enclosure. Some other enclosures in other parts of the zoo are out to date too regarding the species present in them, so it would be not strange. However, looking at the import date of Blandford's foxes for Tabernas in ZTL, there are still doubts about if they could be present here...

Same for the many rarities of amphibian-reptiles in the reptile house. I almost didn't saw none of them, except the ones signaged in such house. I highly doubt the other species are present here, and if present maybe they are BTS.
 
INDEX



I have created the quoted Index and added it to the beginning of the thread, in order to make it a more useful and easy-to-reference long-term resource :)
 
It's been a while since I updated or did anything with this thread so I'm going to ask if anyone had any requests? I'm thinking about doing the German aquariums as I never got around to finishing those but that would be a serious amount of work of course. I was also envisioning doing Russian collections but that doesn't seem likely now. Of course parts of the thread are a bit out of date already given they were written over a year ago but I'm not sure I have the time nor the patience to do a whole makeover just yet, maybe in a year's time?
 
It's been a while since I updated or did anything with this thread so I'm going to ask if anyone had any requests? I'm thinking about doing the German aquariums as I never got around to finishing those but that would be a serious amount of work of course. I was also envisioning doing Russian collections but that doesn't seem likely now. Of course parts of the thread are a bit out of date already given they were written over a year ago but I'm not sure I have the time nor the patience to do a whole makeover just yet, maybe in a year's time?
Can I just say that I've found this thread hugely helpful, even though it is slightly outdated in some aspects now. I visited Zoo Berlin & the Tierpark the other week & it was very easy just to print off the lists from this thread for those to collections as to what would be the species I most wanted to see. Thanks!
 
It's been a while since I updated or did anything with this thread so I'm going to ask if anyone had any requests? I'm thinking about doing the German aquariums as I never got around to finishing those but that would be a serious amount of work of course. I was also envisioning doing Russian collections but that doesn't seem likely now. Of course parts of the thread are a bit out of date already given they were written over a year ago but I'm not sure I have the time nor the patience to do a whole makeover just yet, maybe in a year's time?

Maybe if readers suggested updates in the mean time it could save you the time and energy, as you would only have to update the already existing posts?
For example, no more Plush-crested jays in Zürich!
 
It's been a while since I updated or did anything with this thread so I'm going to ask if anyone had any requests? I'm thinking about doing the German aquariums as I never got around to finishing those but that would be a serious amount of work of course. I was also envisioning doing Russian collections but that doesn't seem likely now. Of course parts of the thread are a bit out of date already given they were written over a year ago but I'm not sure I have the time nor the patience to do a whole makeover just yet, maybe in a year's time?

You thread is excellent source, but there is a lot of gaps in ZTL. The last two years many zoos haven't been visited and updated regularly and there is a lot of discrepancies. The animal houses were also closed until few months ago and many things changed there too. But we can keep contributing to your thread by posting news from our visits.

I can add
Brown long-eared bat/ Plecotus auritus at British Wildlife Centre, which is not even listed in ZTL.
 
Hey all,

Revisiting this thread for the first time in a while, I'm not too sure how much more I can do without doing a complete update, so I don't think there'll be significant addition for a while unless people have specific requests. The nature of the project as a sort of 'snapshot' in time as well as the fluid nature of zoos makes it something that will inevitably become outdated over time. I will however make this small addition, which I apparently forgot to list originally:

Krokodyli Zoo Praha

Rather unassumingly located in a backstreet of Northern Prague, the crocodile zoo is not only home to a number of rare crocodilians but also probably the best collection of tortoises in Europe. See below for an overview of the rarities:

Reptiles: Angulated tortoise, Argentine tortoise, Beaked cape tortoise, Cyrenaica tortoise, Greater padloper, Impressed tortoise, Middle Eastern spur-thighed tortoise, Moroccan tortoise, Serrated tortoise, South African bowsprit tortoise, Southeastern hingeback tortoise, Speckled cape tortoise, Yucatan spinytail iguana.
 
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