A triple shot post, today, I'm afraid. I'm in a hectic stretch of the trip for both writing projects, so hopefully I can keep things on track. After Ljubljana I hit three very significant collections in the space of a week, and I don't want to fall behind.
Zoo #26 - Dubrovnik Aquarium, 8/06/2017
This tiny place is, by a considerable distance, the smallest collection I expect to visit on this trip. It's the public display arm of a marine research institute based in Dubrovnik, and exhibits only local Adriatic Sea fauna. When I say tiny, I mean it's tiny - a total of 30 tanks, none more than a couple of thousand litres in volume. It has a couple of moderate sized concrete pools set into the floor (one houses a rehab sea turtle, with signage assuring visitors that the pool meets EAZA standards), but most exhibits are set into the walls or in free-standing banks of tanks. A pressed-for-time Zoochatter could be in and out in five minutes. I lingered for perhaps half an hour.
To be honest, the collection here was not very interesting, although given the relatively uncommon collection theme it might well be worthwhile for life tick hunters. For me, though, the drawcard was the unique setting: it's built within the fortress of St John, part of the Dubrovnik City Walls, and it's a gorgeous place to put an aquarium. Fish tanks take the place of cannons in the casements, and the inevitable marine-themed visual effects dance across a vaulted brick ceiling.
It looks a bit like a themed section of a Sea Life Centre, only this one wasn't flat-packed in an aquarium-equivalent of IKEA and assembled on site. It's real. That might be both its blessing and its curse, though: as what might perhaps be the only public aquarium in a UNESCO World Heritage listed building, expansion is impossible and even any alterations are severely limited.
I wouldn't go out of your way for this one, and at 60 kuna - about €8.50 - it's overpriced. But it's a cool setting, and I caught myself wondering if it couldn't perhaps become one part of a bigger facility. Dubrovnik, as a major (and already pricey) seaside tourist destination, would be a great location for a major aquarium, obviously outside the Old Town, and the existing aquarium could be included in the same ticket. Of course, knowing our luck McMerlin would run the thing.
Zoo #27, Zoo Zagreb, 15/06/2017
We've already established a pattern that my reactions to zoos often revert to the mean of expectations: with a couple of exceptions, I tend to be quietly disappointed when I visit one of the global elite, and then pleasantly surprised - sometimes ecstatically so - when I then go to one that isn't expected to offer much. Park Zagreb in the latter category.
I only had one full day in the city, and I'd managed to pick out a public holiday I'd never heard of (Corpus Christi). I discovered this only after wandering about a strangely deserted old town and finding that multiple museums I had considered visiting were closed. Ho hum, but at least the zoo was sticking to its normal hours, and at this time of year that means closing at eight. I wish, I wish, I wish Australian zoos would do this too. In January it's light until 9PM at home: I could knock off work at 5, be at Melbourne Zoo at 5:30 and do an entire circuit in the cool of the evening, rather than being forced to contend with weekend crowds. But that veers far too close to being focused on a good visitor experience for an Australian zoo.
Anyway. I couldn't stay until 8 because one of the few vego restaurants I'd found to be open was closing then, but I could stay until 6:30 or so, and thus I semi-took advantage of Europe's enlightened zoo visiting hours. Because I knew the zoo was small - only 7 hectares - I arrived about 4, feeling confident that I could see it all comfortably in that time.
I was right, as it turned out, but the visit was more rushed and stressful than it needed to be. Partly that's because I underestimated the size and quality of the zoo's indoor spaces, and partly it's because of a horrendous lack of signage at the zoo. There's a map as you enter, but after that you're on your own, and they don't hand out maps either. Because it's an old-fashioned layout with lots of turning back in and around itself, it's hard to navigate and the lack of signage meant I wasn't at all confident I was seeing everything. All I could do was find what bits I could, review the map once I got back to the entrance, and then double back for anything I missed: when I did so I found that I'd missed a tapir exhibit, but decided I could live with it and went for dinner.
Compounding my disorientation was the way the zoo uses water features as the only physical barrier (at least on one side) between it and the surrounding city park. It's gorgeous, and it creates an illusion of enormous space in what is in reality a very small, narrow zoo. But it did make it hard to be sure whether I'd been everywhere, especially considering the same water features wind in and out of portions of the zoo, as well.
As an aside, there's a delightful touch here in which each of the paths is named after an eminent naturalist or conservationist - in addition to some Croatian names I didn't recognise were the likes of Charles Darwin, Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, Bernard Grzimek and Gerald Durrell. The only thing that would have made thistle satisfying is a map that showed me which street was where! But I shouldn't labour that point.
Anyway. The zoo itself. It's genuinely good and, pound for pound, would hold its own against most of the zoos I've visited in Europe thus far. It is the fifth post-Communist zoo I've visited and it is the best so far: it's less ambitious and more successful than Budapest, which is more complete but compromises on quality to achieve it.
Zagreb has only half a roster of ABC mammals - there are lions, leopards, brown and sun bears, sea lions, zebras and chimpanzees, but there are no tigers, elephants, giraffes, rhinos, gorillas or orang-utans, and the only hippo is a pygmy. There's a cheetah exhibit in which I didn't see a cheetah but found plenty of tortoises, which is either a very daring mix or an indication the cheetahs aren't there. The exhibits for these ABCs vary in quality, but are mostly at the lower end of Zagreb's scale. A very new looking lion enclosure is the exception here: it's a bit mock-rocky but a good size, and it might be what passes as a naturalistic exhibit on a Zagreb budget.
Small mammal exhibits are pretty much all of a kind, except that the coypu exhibit is overflowing with copious coypus: there are at least 30 of them. An interesting mix that I regretted not getting to see in action - because the animals were all locked inside their respective night quarters in the huge and meandering rainforest house - were lar gibbons, otters and giant anteaters.
The bird collection is modest and pretty much standard, but where Zagreb knocked me out was the depth and breadth of its reptile collection, which sprawls out across at least different buildings - the afore-mentioned rainforest house, small North American and African-themed buildings and the 'Snakes of Croatia' building, which houses, in gorgeous big vivariums, what I assume is an encyclopaedic collection of native snakes as well as a legless lizard for comparison's sake. There's a lot of viperids here, and it's one of the very few European zoos I've visited with a substantial venomous collection. Zagreb might also have given me a new favourite reptile: I can't remember the last time I saw a new species and audibly gasped, but I did when I first saw a turquoise gecko.
Even the conventional, usually boring species do well here: I saw an albino Burmese python climbing right up to the top of branches in its' corner office-sized enclosure, and even an anaconda was up on a branch, and it struck me how rarely giant constrictors have anything other than a tiled floor and a basin of water to work with. Give them the opportunity and they might just show off for you. Overall, the general standard of reptile exhibit here has only been matched or exceeded only by Zurich, Basel and Vienna so far on this trip. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Zoo #28 - Zoo Ljubljana, 17/06/2017
I'm writing this through a fog of exhaustion so thick I can barely see the screen to type, but hopefully it works out ok. I didn't get off to a great start on Ljubljana Zoo day: an already obscene wake-up of 5:40 for a Swans AFL match was brought forward by three hours as first one, then three more inconsiderate brutes came into the dorm at 2:40 and 4:20AM, respectively. If you're arriving then, fine, but give some thought to the fact that people are sleeping and finish your conversation outside.
Can you tell I'm a bit grumpy?
Anyway, it's the day after now and I'm even worse, having stupidly misread when my train booking was due to leave Ljubljana, missing it, and having to get a Flixbus at the cost of €40 and two hours less sleep at my overnight stopping point. I reckon I've slept about 8 hours in the last 50. I'm struggling. The zoo provided two of the best of those 50 hours, though. The best of all was the last hour of the footy, after we came from six goals behind to keep our season alive.
The national zoo of Slovenia this might be, but in practical terms it's a small regional city zoo: Ljubljana is a city or less than 300,000 people, the capital of a country of about two million. Like most regional city zoos the collection is modest, and Ljubljana leans heavily on child-friendly attractions - playgrounds, trampolines, mechanical diggers, ropes courses - to get families through the gates. It's certainly a zoo first and amusement park second, though, so it didn't annoy me. You've gotta do what you've gotta do.
Serving a local clientele, the species line-up here is close to as ABC as it gets. There are tokenistic bird and reptile collections - the latter concentrated in a room with about 15 small tanks, which also include a couple of amphibians, some inverts, spiny mice and a tenrec, which is the most outré species in the zoo. The birds are a mix of parrots, owls, pelicans, swans, Canada geese, black storks and ratites. The parrots - and some of the owls - are in a row of aviaries with heavy, dark mesh that makes viewing into a couple of them quite difficult.
It's really about the mammals, then. There's maybe 30 species or so, most of which are in the older, lower portion of the zoo (an expansion is underway up the hill behind this core area, of which more in a moment). None of the enclosures in this section are intrinsically very interesting but most are more than adequate, with decent sizes and organic furnishings the norm.
There are some notable exceptions, though. The solitary elephant has a small, barren yard straight out of the 1960s. I don't know how old she is but I'm guessing she's getting on, and when she dies she shouldn't be replaced in this exhibit. At a stretch it might be ok for a surplus black rhino instead. A capybara yard doesn't meet the species' needs as it has only two tiny backyard wading pools of water - neither individual would be able to immerse themselves.
There's a disappointing gibbon island - just a few bare, thin branches with ropes between them, giving the gibbons a theoretical option to brachiate but no incentive to do so. Worst of all, however - partly because it appears to be quite new - is a barren, concrete, pair of tiny cages for a small group of chimps. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe it's a legacy from a bygone era and has simply been recently renovated - but if it's a recent addition it's a considerable failure both of ambition and realisation. I'd consider them parsimonious even for gibbons, let alone chimps.
That's the disappointing stuff out of the way, then. Let me talk about the good bit. As mentioned, the zoo is currently growing into the heavily-forested hill behind it. Work continues and several enclosures are shown on the map as under construction, including for moose and vultures, but a couple of new-ish exhibits are open for alpine ibex and lynx. The ibex exhibit is pretty good, but the lynx enclosure is something else entirely.
I'm going to draw a distinction between 'exhibit' and 'enclosure' here, because it's important. Ljubljana's lynx enclosure has some limitations as an exhibit: it's up a very steep, 20% gradient on unsealed paths, so it's effectively off-limits to anybody with mobility issues. And there's only one vantage point into a large enclosure. As I approached I was skeptical about my chances of spotting a lynx, only to be outdone by not one but two small children who saw different individual cats before I did.
I've always felt that small cats get massively short-changed in zoos. Given the opportunity they would use all the space that big cats get, but they tend to be consigned to tiny cages more suitable for squirrel monkeys. Not here. Ljubljana has taken the direct, discount route to excellence by taking a big chunk of native forest - at least two, perhaps even three standard tiger exhibits worth - and put a fence around it. The land has a ravine with a natural water course running through it, and felled logs provide a path across it for the cats. If they wanted to they could disappear in the undergrowth and never be seen, and I suspect in a smaller exhibit, with closer proximity to visitors, that's exactly what they would do.
There are big, mature trees that the cats have full access to, with wooden platforms metres up in the air: one of the cats was using one, while the other was spotted walking in and out of the sunlight between the trees - from a distance of perhaps 25m, I guess, from the viewing platform. I'm never likely to see a lynx in the wild, but if I do I imagine it would be an almost identical sighting. Is there higher praise for an animal enclosure than that? It's the best cat habitat I've ever seen in a zoo.
Zoo #26 - Dubrovnik Aquarium, 8/06/2017
This tiny place is, by a considerable distance, the smallest collection I expect to visit on this trip. It's the public display arm of a marine research institute based in Dubrovnik, and exhibits only local Adriatic Sea fauna. When I say tiny, I mean it's tiny - a total of 30 tanks, none more than a couple of thousand litres in volume. It has a couple of moderate sized concrete pools set into the floor (one houses a rehab sea turtle, with signage assuring visitors that the pool meets EAZA standards), but most exhibits are set into the walls or in free-standing banks of tanks. A pressed-for-time Zoochatter could be in and out in five minutes. I lingered for perhaps half an hour.
To be honest, the collection here was not very interesting, although given the relatively uncommon collection theme it might well be worthwhile for life tick hunters. For me, though, the drawcard was the unique setting: it's built within the fortress of St John, part of the Dubrovnik City Walls, and it's a gorgeous place to put an aquarium. Fish tanks take the place of cannons in the casements, and the inevitable marine-themed visual effects dance across a vaulted brick ceiling.
It looks a bit like a themed section of a Sea Life Centre, only this one wasn't flat-packed in an aquarium-equivalent of IKEA and assembled on site. It's real. That might be both its blessing and its curse, though: as what might perhaps be the only public aquarium in a UNESCO World Heritage listed building, expansion is impossible and even any alterations are severely limited.
I wouldn't go out of your way for this one, and at 60 kuna - about €8.50 - it's overpriced. But it's a cool setting, and I caught myself wondering if it couldn't perhaps become one part of a bigger facility. Dubrovnik, as a major (and already pricey) seaside tourist destination, would be a great location for a major aquarium, obviously outside the Old Town, and the existing aquarium could be included in the same ticket. Of course, knowing our luck McMerlin would run the thing.
Zoo #27, Zoo Zagreb, 15/06/2017
We've already established a pattern that my reactions to zoos often revert to the mean of expectations: with a couple of exceptions, I tend to be quietly disappointed when I visit one of the global elite, and then pleasantly surprised - sometimes ecstatically so - when I then go to one that isn't expected to offer much. Park Zagreb in the latter category.
I only had one full day in the city, and I'd managed to pick out a public holiday I'd never heard of (Corpus Christi). I discovered this only after wandering about a strangely deserted old town and finding that multiple museums I had considered visiting were closed. Ho hum, but at least the zoo was sticking to its normal hours, and at this time of year that means closing at eight. I wish, I wish, I wish Australian zoos would do this too. In January it's light until 9PM at home: I could knock off work at 5, be at Melbourne Zoo at 5:30 and do an entire circuit in the cool of the evening, rather than being forced to contend with weekend crowds. But that veers far too close to being focused on a good visitor experience for an Australian zoo.
Anyway. I couldn't stay until 8 because one of the few vego restaurants I'd found to be open was closing then, but I could stay until 6:30 or so, and thus I semi-took advantage of Europe's enlightened zoo visiting hours. Because I knew the zoo was small - only 7 hectares - I arrived about 4, feeling confident that I could see it all comfortably in that time.
I was right, as it turned out, but the visit was more rushed and stressful than it needed to be. Partly that's because I underestimated the size and quality of the zoo's indoor spaces, and partly it's because of a horrendous lack of signage at the zoo. There's a map as you enter, but after that you're on your own, and they don't hand out maps either. Because it's an old-fashioned layout with lots of turning back in and around itself, it's hard to navigate and the lack of signage meant I wasn't at all confident I was seeing everything. All I could do was find what bits I could, review the map once I got back to the entrance, and then double back for anything I missed: when I did so I found that I'd missed a tapir exhibit, but decided I could live with it and went for dinner.
Compounding my disorientation was the way the zoo uses water features as the only physical barrier (at least on one side) between it and the surrounding city park. It's gorgeous, and it creates an illusion of enormous space in what is in reality a very small, narrow zoo. But it did make it hard to be sure whether I'd been everywhere, especially considering the same water features wind in and out of portions of the zoo, as well.
As an aside, there's a delightful touch here in which each of the paths is named after an eminent naturalist or conservationist - in addition to some Croatian names I didn't recognise were the likes of Charles Darwin, Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, Bernard Grzimek and Gerald Durrell. The only thing that would have made thistle satisfying is a map that showed me which street was where! But I shouldn't labour that point.
Anyway. The zoo itself. It's genuinely good and, pound for pound, would hold its own against most of the zoos I've visited in Europe thus far. It is the fifth post-Communist zoo I've visited and it is the best so far: it's less ambitious and more successful than Budapest, which is more complete but compromises on quality to achieve it.
Zagreb has only half a roster of ABC mammals - there are lions, leopards, brown and sun bears, sea lions, zebras and chimpanzees, but there are no tigers, elephants, giraffes, rhinos, gorillas or orang-utans, and the only hippo is a pygmy. There's a cheetah exhibit in which I didn't see a cheetah but found plenty of tortoises, which is either a very daring mix or an indication the cheetahs aren't there. The exhibits for these ABCs vary in quality, but are mostly at the lower end of Zagreb's scale. A very new looking lion enclosure is the exception here: it's a bit mock-rocky but a good size, and it might be what passes as a naturalistic exhibit on a Zagreb budget.
Small mammal exhibits are pretty much all of a kind, except that the coypu exhibit is overflowing with copious coypus: there are at least 30 of them. An interesting mix that I regretted not getting to see in action - because the animals were all locked inside their respective night quarters in the huge and meandering rainforest house - were lar gibbons, otters and giant anteaters.
The bird collection is modest and pretty much standard, but where Zagreb knocked me out was the depth and breadth of its reptile collection, which sprawls out across at least different buildings - the afore-mentioned rainforest house, small North American and African-themed buildings and the 'Snakes of Croatia' building, which houses, in gorgeous big vivariums, what I assume is an encyclopaedic collection of native snakes as well as a legless lizard for comparison's sake. There's a lot of viperids here, and it's one of the very few European zoos I've visited with a substantial venomous collection. Zagreb might also have given me a new favourite reptile: I can't remember the last time I saw a new species and audibly gasped, but I did when I first saw a turquoise gecko.
Even the conventional, usually boring species do well here: I saw an albino Burmese python climbing right up to the top of branches in its' corner office-sized enclosure, and even an anaconda was up on a branch, and it struck me how rarely giant constrictors have anything other than a tiled floor and a basin of water to work with. Give them the opportunity and they might just show off for you. Overall, the general standard of reptile exhibit here has only been matched or exceeded only by Zurich, Basel and Vienna so far on this trip. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Zoo #28 - Zoo Ljubljana, 17/06/2017
I'm writing this through a fog of exhaustion so thick I can barely see the screen to type, but hopefully it works out ok. I didn't get off to a great start on Ljubljana Zoo day: an already obscene wake-up of 5:40 for a Swans AFL match was brought forward by three hours as first one, then three more inconsiderate brutes came into the dorm at 2:40 and 4:20AM, respectively. If you're arriving then, fine, but give some thought to the fact that people are sleeping and finish your conversation outside.
Can you tell I'm a bit grumpy?
Anyway, it's the day after now and I'm even worse, having stupidly misread when my train booking was due to leave Ljubljana, missing it, and having to get a Flixbus at the cost of €40 and two hours less sleep at my overnight stopping point. I reckon I've slept about 8 hours in the last 50. I'm struggling. The zoo provided two of the best of those 50 hours, though. The best of all was the last hour of the footy, after we came from six goals behind to keep our season alive.
The national zoo of Slovenia this might be, but in practical terms it's a small regional city zoo: Ljubljana is a city or less than 300,000 people, the capital of a country of about two million. Like most regional city zoos the collection is modest, and Ljubljana leans heavily on child-friendly attractions - playgrounds, trampolines, mechanical diggers, ropes courses - to get families through the gates. It's certainly a zoo first and amusement park second, though, so it didn't annoy me. You've gotta do what you've gotta do.
Serving a local clientele, the species line-up here is close to as ABC as it gets. There are tokenistic bird and reptile collections - the latter concentrated in a room with about 15 small tanks, which also include a couple of amphibians, some inverts, spiny mice and a tenrec, which is the most outré species in the zoo. The birds are a mix of parrots, owls, pelicans, swans, Canada geese, black storks and ratites. The parrots - and some of the owls - are in a row of aviaries with heavy, dark mesh that makes viewing into a couple of them quite difficult.
It's really about the mammals, then. There's maybe 30 species or so, most of which are in the older, lower portion of the zoo (an expansion is underway up the hill behind this core area, of which more in a moment). None of the enclosures in this section are intrinsically very interesting but most are more than adequate, with decent sizes and organic furnishings the norm.
There are some notable exceptions, though. The solitary elephant has a small, barren yard straight out of the 1960s. I don't know how old she is but I'm guessing she's getting on, and when she dies she shouldn't be replaced in this exhibit. At a stretch it might be ok for a surplus black rhino instead. A capybara yard doesn't meet the species' needs as it has only two tiny backyard wading pools of water - neither individual would be able to immerse themselves.
There's a disappointing gibbon island - just a few bare, thin branches with ropes between them, giving the gibbons a theoretical option to brachiate but no incentive to do so. Worst of all, however - partly because it appears to be quite new - is a barren, concrete, pair of tiny cages for a small group of chimps. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe it's a legacy from a bygone era and has simply been recently renovated - but if it's a recent addition it's a considerable failure both of ambition and realisation. I'd consider them parsimonious even for gibbons, let alone chimps.
That's the disappointing stuff out of the way, then. Let me talk about the good bit. As mentioned, the zoo is currently growing into the heavily-forested hill behind it. Work continues and several enclosures are shown on the map as under construction, including for moose and vultures, but a couple of new-ish exhibits are open for alpine ibex and lynx. The ibex exhibit is pretty good, but the lynx enclosure is something else entirely.
I'm going to draw a distinction between 'exhibit' and 'enclosure' here, because it's important. Ljubljana's lynx enclosure has some limitations as an exhibit: it's up a very steep, 20% gradient on unsealed paths, so it's effectively off-limits to anybody with mobility issues. And there's only one vantage point into a large enclosure. As I approached I was skeptical about my chances of spotting a lynx, only to be outdone by not one but two small children who saw different individual cats before I did.
I've always felt that small cats get massively short-changed in zoos. Given the opportunity they would use all the space that big cats get, but they tend to be consigned to tiny cages more suitable for squirrel monkeys. Not here. Ljubljana has taken the direct, discount route to excellence by taking a big chunk of native forest - at least two, perhaps even three standard tiger exhibits worth - and put a fence around it. The land has a ravine with a natural water course running through it, and felled logs provide a path across it for the cats. If they wanted to they could disappear in the undergrowth and never be seen, and I suspect in a smaller exhibit, with closer proximity to visitors, that's exactly what they would do.
There are big, mature trees that the cats have full access to, with wooden platforms metres up in the air: one of the cats was using one, while the other was spotted walking in and out of the sunlight between the trees - from a distance of perhaps 25m, I guess, from the viewing platform. I'm never likely to see a lynx in the wild, but if I do I imagine it would be an almost identical sighting. Is there higher praise for an animal enclosure than that? It's the best cat habitat I've ever seen in a zoo.
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I have been in Prague for the last week, visiting various other Czech collections over the course of the last few days but using the aforementioned city as a base. It would have been interesting to have bumped into you, but it was not to be. Back in the dreary UK now......
