Zoo #12: Beauval Zoo, 10/4/2017
An ultimately rewarding but incredibly tiring and at times stressful day. Beauval was one of about 15 zoos that I thought was a contender for a top ten ranking from this trip, and one of perhaps ten in contention for the top five. So it was always going to make the cut, but in this case that cut involved leaving my Paris hostel at about 6:30AM for a bus to the train station, where a train would take me to Blois, from where I could get a bus that would deposit me at the zoo at about 10:30AM. The same bus then departed the zoo at 17:15, giving me a little over six hours to see everything. The whole day became a lot more draining when I woke up at 4:15AM and, conscious of the ticking alarm clock, couldn't get back to sleep.
It was as my bus was entering the village of Saint Aignan that I got my first inkling of what I was in for. The bus hit the village and traffic stopped. I had thought the timetable for getting to the zoo - Blois to Beauval in an hour - seemed excessive. A good quarter of that hour, though, was the last 3km as we inched closer and closer to the zoo. It. Was. Packed.
I knew Beauval to be popular, but I hadn't anticipated what looked and felt like a public holiday crowd on a Monday. As far as I know this isn't school holiday time in France, though that could be it. Anyway, for a zoo in a relatively rural part of France it is certainly pulling a crowd. I worry that it might be a success built on shallow foundations, though. I suspect this is a zoo that needs constant novelties to get the crowds - many of whom must be coming from long distances away - to keep showing up.
There are signs all around the zoo identifying the year that certain developments opened, and it's clear that they try to have something new and significant every year - probably times, as the lions were, for the beginning of the peak season in April. But where does one go when you've already added and built annual marketing campaigns around all of the ABCs? They already have elephants, giraffes, rhinos (2 species), zebras, hippos, gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, sea lions, penguins, brown bears, lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars and snow leopards.
The next step, I guess, is to go for the rarer star attractions, but they already have okapis, koalas, manatees and, of course, black and white blob bears. I guess they can go into sharks and dolphins, but they're a long way from the ocean so it might be a struggle economically. They've also already got a lot of crowd-pulling 'white' animals: white lions, a white tiger, white alligators, Burmese pythons and wallabies.
That leaves building new exhibits for existing species housed in older enclosures, which has clearly been the thrust of most recent development. There's a couple of these left: the brown bears have a tiny enclosure and most of the big cats are in adequate, but unspectacular pens. But once they build new accommodation for them, what's left to do? What will bring people through the door again in 2021? I don't know.
Anyway, back to the zoo. For a while I thought covering the zoo in the time available might be tough, especially given the over-crowding, but it turned out to be fine. I think that with perhaps one or two exceptions I'm not going to be crunched for time at any zoo I visit along the way, which is a good thing. Nevertheless, I gave relatively short thrift to the section of the zoo housing the okapis, elephants and blob bears (among others). I was, as ever, bemused by the Australian house, which had koalas and tree kangaroos behind glass, with Outback-themed paint jobs and accompanied by a couple of reef tanks.
I really liked how Beauval has integrated aquatic (manatee and piranha) and reptilian exhibits into its two indoor great ape complexes. It's a smart use of structures that reduces the number of buildings cluttering up the open space, as the core of the zoo is already quite built up as it is.
The bird collection here is excellent, especially parrots, though many of the latter are in inadequate small aviaries. I'll hopefully get around to updating the two challenge threads soon but I had my best day for passerines thus far, not that that's saying a great deal.
I'd like to know their secret with the savannah exhibit, which has mostly decent sized groups of no fewer than seven species, allegedly on three hectares (I think it's quite a bit smaller than that). And yet, despite heavy cropping by large animals, the exhibit is covered in lush green grass. How do they do it?
I thought the (seemingly very new) hippopotamus complex was decent: it's netted over in its entirety, so that the exhibit doubles as a walk-through aviary for African water birds. The frustration, however, was the same one that I have with virtually every modern hippo exhibit I've seen: bountiful water space, but small land area and no access to pasture despite this being an integral part of a hippo's behaviour. Smaller pools + bigger paddocks = happier hippos.
The new lion complex is adjacent to the hippo one. It might be open but it's not yet finished: for example there is a shell of a soon-to-be naked mole-rat exhibit, but it's only a shell. I saw no sign of African hunting dogs and the lions seemed to be confined to their indoor quarters (visible through glass). There are some sub-adult males here that will only inhabit the new exhibit for a very short time, I think.
By the time I had seen the entire zoo I was impressed, but ever so slightly deflated as well. This was partly that I was exhausted, but it was also the same dynamic as I had at Bronx Zoo two years ago. The gap between a good and a great zoo is not that wide: Beauval has some great features, but also some weaker ones. In short, it's just another zoo: if you'll forgive the stats language, it's perhaps two standard deviations better than average but still within the normal, expected range for a zoo.
Well, normal and expected except for one thing. I hadn't planned to see the bird show but I had the time, and was near enough to where the amphitheatre was to make the second show. I was there about 15 minutes early, but if I had been 10 minutes early I doubt I would have had a seat.
The show starts sedately and familiarly enough, with a few owls buzzing the crowd. Then came a segment with a pair of crested seriemas, which just prowled about for a couple of minutes eating worms or something similar. The show was held up for a while as one of the seriemas played a long con on its handler. It stayed out when called to go inside, got a worm to coax it in, then waited, got another worm and waited again. Eventually the keeper literally chased it inside.
From here things started to pick up, with the usual raptors and vultures. But as new birds came out the ones that had been there stuck around. Soon there were five birds of prey, then ten, then twenty. Suddenly parrots emerged from all directions - macaws, cockatoos, conures, amazons and African greys. Marabou storks made an appearance, followed by cranes, then pelicans, then ibis. There must have been 100 birds zipping around in every direction. It was as if one - no, ten - of those posters you see featuring bird species of a given locality had come to life, Pixar style, before my eyes.
It was mesmerising. Just when I was starting to think there was nothing left in the zoo world to surprise me, along comes the Beauval Zoo bird department, to sucker punch me with a show so inconceivable that it upended the natural order of things. Up is down, left is right, down is left, right is up, a malign anthropomorphic carrot is President and Beauval Zoo can put on a bird show with at least 100 birds flapping about at once. Unbelievable.
