Zoo #38: Copenhagen Zoo, 26/07/2017
I bet you didn't guess, when I wrote about The Blue Planet, that I'd be visiting Copenhagen Zoo next.
This is an odd one because though I very much enjoyed my afternoon, bleeding into early evening here, I think it's gone down a notch or two in my head in the couple of days since visiting. It's not that there's anything egregious here - indeed, the standard is more consistently good than at most zoos I've visited on this trip. It's solid. Dependable. But it's like Andy Murray playing at the Australian Open: you can back him in to make the final, but you don't really ever believe he's going to win it, do you? Copenhagen isn't going to win the Australian Open either.
The only really famous exhibit - or at least, that I'd heard stuff about - is the Arctic Ring. It's a beautiful exhibit. I spent a good amount of time watching the underside of a swimming polar bear in the tunnel, and it's a memorable experience. But is it as good an exhibit for a polar bear as it is for me, the viewer? It's a bit on the small side, is it not?
The same was true of the pair of brown bear exhibits further along the Nearctic section of the zoo behind Arctic Ring, though I did linger for a while at the bigger one. A keeper was doing a scatter feed, but rather than simply throw the food over the fence herself she went from visitor to visitor, handing out apples and pears to the kids and letting them throw them over the glass instead. A small gesture that will have greatly enhanced those visitors' experiences. Well, except for one woman, whose pear failed to clear the glass and ricocheted back, hitting her in the head. That greatly enhanced *my* visitor experience instead.
The same basic pattern repeated itself for most of the big mammal exhibits - and this is mostly a big mammal zoo. Elephants: good, but falls short of great. African savannah: good, but falls short of great. The cat exhibits are ok. The exhibit for harbour seals is basic but functional, and I had been thinking it had a rather large, oddly wooded land portion, only to be quite startled when a reindeer suddenly appeared. Not a mix I expected to see.
The worst of the big mammal exhibits was the wholly indoor affair for chimps: it's a long way off the worst chimp exhibit I've seen (I see you there, Ljubljana, letting your chimps down. You too, Kraków). But I don't like fully indoors exhibits for apes. I did think the primate house exhibits, though not much aesthetically, were quite good, with generous outdoor areas that the monkeys were actually using. There's a new group of baboons that are still settling in, so part of the indoor space is sealed off while they get comfortable.
Tassie devils are, obviously, not going to quite excite me like they do your average dasyurid-deprived non-Aussie. But I was very impressed by the complex of devil enclosures here. They're more open and exposed than Australian ones tend to be, sure, but they're big and offer lots of opportunities both for the devils to climb up and see out of the exhibit, and also to dig: one devil disappeared into a burrow that was clearly of its own making, and it actually shocked me a little to realise that I've never seen that before. I wonder why?
One thing that zoos can do for visitors that often gets overlooked, I think, is wifi. Not a big deal for locals but for tourists like me, a hotspot or two is invaluable, and I was taking advantage of one when I was approached by a man with a clipboard. Allan was a market researcher, and wanted my feedback on interactions with the staff at the zoo. I've done the same thankless task a couple of times myself, so I was happy enough to oblige, but I was conscious along the way that I was probably highlighting things that are rather different to most visitors, and warned that I was a 'zoo nerd' who might just skew his data a little.
'Zoo nerd'? Allan asked me to explain what I meant. See, he's only a part-time interviewer: he's also a freelance journalist, and the idea of a zoo nerd - of an adult who would spend six months traipsing around Europe trying to see all its significant zoos - piqued his interest. I told him that I'm by no means the nerdiest of zoo nerds: I'm not going to name names, of course, there will be no mention of Himalayan big cats, of storks, of mangabeys, tea-drinkers or any other species that might out-do me on the zoo nerd scale. Nevertheless, he was interested enough to take my email address with a view of potentially following up on this niche interest of ours. Who knows. We might be about to become famous.
I bet you didn't guess, when I wrote about The Blue Planet, that I'd be visiting Copenhagen Zoo next.
This is an odd one because though I very much enjoyed my afternoon, bleeding into early evening here, I think it's gone down a notch or two in my head in the couple of days since visiting. It's not that there's anything egregious here - indeed, the standard is more consistently good than at most zoos I've visited on this trip. It's solid. Dependable. But it's like Andy Murray playing at the Australian Open: you can back him in to make the final, but you don't really ever believe he's going to win it, do you? Copenhagen isn't going to win the Australian Open either.
The only really famous exhibit - or at least, that I'd heard stuff about - is the Arctic Ring. It's a beautiful exhibit. I spent a good amount of time watching the underside of a swimming polar bear in the tunnel, and it's a memorable experience. But is it as good an exhibit for a polar bear as it is for me, the viewer? It's a bit on the small side, is it not?
The same was true of the pair of brown bear exhibits further along the Nearctic section of the zoo behind Arctic Ring, though I did linger for a while at the bigger one. A keeper was doing a scatter feed, but rather than simply throw the food over the fence herself she went from visitor to visitor, handing out apples and pears to the kids and letting them throw them over the glass instead. A small gesture that will have greatly enhanced those visitors' experiences. Well, except for one woman, whose pear failed to clear the glass and ricocheted back, hitting her in the head. That greatly enhanced *my* visitor experience instead.
The same basic pattern repeated itself for most of the big mammal exhibits - and this is mostly a big mammal zoo. Elephants: good, but falls short of great. African savannah: good, but falls short of great. The cat exhibits are ok. The exhibit for harbour seals is basic but functional, and I had been thinking it had a rather large, oddly wooded land portion, only to be quite startled when a reindeer suddenly appeared. Not a mix I expected to see.
The worst of the big mammal exhibits was the wholly indoor affair for chimps: it's a long way off the worst chimp exhibit I've seen (I see you there, Ljubljana, letting your chimps down. You too, Kraków). But I don't like fully indoors exhibits for apes. I did think the primate house exhibits, though not much aesthetically, were quite good, with generous outdoor areas that the monkeys were actually using. There's a new group of baboons that are still settling in, so part of the indoor space is sealed off while they get comfortable.
Tassie devils are, obviously, not going to quite excite me like they do your average dasyurid-deprived non-Aussie. But I was very impressed by the complex of devil enclosures here. They're more open and exposed than Australian ones tend to be, sure, but they're big and offer lots of opportunities both for the devils to climb up and see out of the exhibit, and also to dig: one devil disappeared into a burrow that was clearly of its own making, and it actually shocked me a little to realise that I've never seen that before. I wonder why?
One thing that zoos can do for visitors that often gets overlooked, I think, is wifi. Not a big deal for locals but for tourists like me, a hotspot or two is invaluable, and I was taking advantage of one when I was approached by a man with a clipboard. Allan was a market researcher, and wanted my feedback on interactions with the staff at the zoo. I've done the same thankless task a couple of times myself, so I was happy enough to oblige, but I was conscious along the way that I was probably highlighting things that are rather different to most visitors, and warned that I was a 'zoo nerd' who might just skew his data a little.
'Zoo nerd'? Allan asked me to explain what I meant. See, he's only a part-time interviewer: he's also a freelance journalist, and the idea of a zoo nerd - of an adult who would spend six months traipsing around Europe trying to see all its significant zoos - piqued his interest. I told him that I'm by no means the nerdiest of zoo nerds: I'm not going to name names, of course, there will be no mention of Himalayan big cats, of storks, of mangabeys, tea-drinkers or any other species that might out-do me on the zoo nerd scale. Nevertheless, he was interested enough to take my email address with a view of potentially following up on this niche interest of ours. Who knows. We might be about to become famous.
) Or oxpecker husbandry, for that matter. We're not all intimately familiar with which passerines are easy to keep and which aren't, but congratulations to Hamburg if they're doing something special with oxpeckers.
