Thanks to everyone offering encouraging words and scepticism about my plans. I try to analyse everything I read. My plans are not only something I've worked up in my head on my own, but actually my own experience from working in zoos. Watching visitors and giving guided tours. Too many visitors run from enclosure to enclosure, barely staying long enough to remember what colour the animal had. I my view, that's neither the visitors fault, nor the animals (not being interesting enough). It all comes down to how it's presented. If the average visitor gets to see an animal close enough, and the animal is expressing a natural behaviour, then it won't matter the slightest if it's rednecked wallaby or a pademelon. My zoo will be aimed at average visitors (but zoo-nerds will be welcome and zoochatters will have free entry
) and it will
aim at pleasing everyone. I know it won't please everyone. I'm not that naive. Some people will think the guided tour is too long. Some will think it's too short. There will be endless things that someone might complain on, and at the planning stage here, there will be endless things that you could do differently (please though, continue with your suggestions for changes, I truly appreciate the feedback and your thoughts).
But, my point about pleasing everyone is about the attention to detail. Enough about that, I'm gonna describe the enclosure for the first wild animal, which will be
Macaca sylvanus.
You'll enter the forest which is made up of large pines and some deciduous trees, ferns and a few large rocks. It's not too far from how the cedar and oak forests in northern Morocco look. You will walk among the macaques and the guide will talk about them, their behaviour and their plight in the wild. To make the exhibit even more interesting, I will have some dreaded domestics there too. The visitors will of course not be able to touch the macaques, but I hope their wish to pet something will be fulfilled by having goats and miniature donkeys there. If it works well the young barbary macaques and the young goats might play together, and if it doesn't work with babies I still think this mixed exhibit will be very popular.
From here you will walk into the next walk-though exhibit. It will be almost entirely made up of deciduous trees of all sizes, with some tropical looking plants planted to make the experience more jungle like. There will be little or no undergrowth, just leaf litter and sand, again to simulate the appearance of a rainforest, or tropical forest. There will be a few more open places, where sun allows the radiated tortoises to bask. I'll also try to put heat lambs underneath logs in thicker forest to allow them to have more choices. They will only be exhibited outdoors, and then of course only when the weather allows it. There will be a group of lemurs, which species will have to be decided later, depending on what is available and in need of holders. I would also like to investigate the possibility of having ringtailed vontsira or narrow-striped boky as part of this mixed exhibit.
More exhibits to follow.
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