Zoo #42: Berlin Zoo & Aquarium: 7/8 and 8/8/2017
If you thought I was well travelled I’ve got news for you son: I’d been to 99 zoos but Berlin wasn’t one.
Now I’ve been to Berlin, and I’ve been to 100 zoos.
I had half an eye on this milestone all the way along. I wanted it to be a zoo I cared about, but the exact number of collections I would visit was never set in stone: Faunia, Tallinn and Skansen got dropped from the plans, but Sofia and Leningrad were added. I’d always resolved that I would shape events so that I would either share the milestone with FunkyGibbon at historic Hagenbeck, or I would mark it at the Berlin behemoth. When I decided to skip Kyiv Zoo I was pretty much locked into Berlin, as to make it to Hagenbeck would have required not only visiting Leningrad, which I did only at the last minute, but also Tallinn and Skansen, which I chose to skip, *and* find another along the way just for the sake of it. Berlin it was: when Leningrad did make the cut after all, I simply changed plans from going to the Tierpark first, to the zoo instead.
100 zoos won’t sound like a lot to many of those reading. But it’s a pretty big one for me. I live in an isolated part of the world: I think that within 600km of my home there are a total of 11 zoos, and given I don’t drive several of them are off limits. Just two and a half years ago I flew to Singapore, with my life list sitting on 33: in that time I’ve tripled my tally. To bring up my century has taken me to 25 foreign countries, not including a couple where I didn’t visit a zoo. I must have travelled close to 100,000km, if not more. It hasn’t been easy batting to get here.
I’ve been to some crappy places, but they’ve mostly been great: in less than 1000 days I have visited Singapore, Jurong, Georgia Aquarium, Bronx, San Diego, Zoorasia, Osaka Aquarium, Oceanario, Oceanografic, Beauval, Zurich, Vienna, Prague, Plzen, Walsrode and now Berlin. It’s possible that I’ve already been to the best zoos on four different continents.
How I visit a zoo has changed. When I went to Singapore I worried mightily about whether I’d need more than a day for Jurong or the zoo. There were so many animals I’d never seen before that others here take for granted: slow loris, capybaras and red river hogs were unknown to me, let alone more exotic fare. A shoebill was something I budgeted for and wore out my soles trying to avoid dealing with.
It’s different now. In both Singapore and the US, giant anteaters were one of my biggest target species. At Berlin today I breezed past the enclosure, taking a quick look to see if one was active, but moving on without seeing one at all, and without any pangs of regret at missing them. I saw an okapi, Arctic wolves, a sloth bear, some bonobos. Each, in their time, were hugely exciting. Now I’m used to them. There’s an element of sadness, if I’m honest, that that phase of my zoo-going life is over.
There’s only a tiny number of species left that could still have that effect, though I got something approaching it in the bird house, when I watched a very active and confident kiwi for several minutes. It’s not the first good view I’ve had of a kiwi: there was one in Osaka, but it was soured by a wholly unsuitable exhibit. Berlin’s is great.
Now it’s not a question of what I see, but how. I’m quite a visual person, I think: I love brightly coloured animals, which is the only thing I can think of that links my affection for parrots, for saltwater fish and for reptiles. Put those animals into a setting that complements and enhances their beauty and I am a happy man. Berlin made me a happy man, twice over: I did the aquarium the day before the zoo, to avoid being rushed, and so on my first day I had some perfectly formed aquatic habitat tanks and a small but exquisite reef. Then I climbed the stairs and found a small but stunning collection of reptile tanks, whose unifying feature was that they were enormously generous to their inhabitants, and beautiful into the bargain. I didn’t see the tuatara, but not for lack of trying. Somebody walked past, saw the little tuatara sign they have that indicates where it tends to live, and questioned why such a small reptile needed such a large enclosure. Because they can, I wanted to reply.
Then on day two I started and finished in the bird house. I was going on a passerine hunt, of course – I think I did okay – but even without my competitive streak I could have spent a very long time here. I’ve expressed my reservations about bird houses in the past, but that’s before I saw the most perfectly realised version of the concept I can imagine. The aviaries are wire both inside and out. From what I saw each of the aviaries (except the two walk-through) had outdoor access, and very often to aviaries much larger than they have indoors. And they have greenery! Even the parrots had hardy, quick-growing plants – weeds, in other words - on the ground of their exhibits. It gives them something to do and me something to be aesthetically pleased by. It’s a win-win.
Berlin’s standard doesn’t quite reach the same heights when it comes to mammal exhibits, though the brand new blob bears exhibit might just be the best I’ve seen for that species: if it’s an indication of what Berlin might come to look like in the future then that’s an exciting future. Even if not, there’s little here that’s outright poor: I’ll come back to the primate house in a minute, but for the most part Berlin is a remarkably consistent run of adequate, functional exhibits that don’t stand out on their own, but that contribute to a cohesive, satisfying whole. An exception is the South American pampas exhibit, which is perhaps the nicest of this essentially cookie cutter format that I’ve seen. And I took delight in seeing three big hippos out of the water on grass, as I’ve been banging on about for five months now. The ha-ha used here was a little unnerving, but in a good way. I’ve been physically closer to hippos that could kill me in an instant before, but I’ve never *felt* physically closer.
The primate house is a disappointment, though. Look, this is not complicated. Northern European zoos are disadvantaged by their climate and have to have on-show indoor facilities unless they want to close for six months of the year. I get it. But that only makes it more important to get the indoor exhibits right. Bare concrete platforms and tiled floors are not getting it right. I don’t care if it’s easier to clean: it’s ugly, it’s wide open to misleading conduct by our animal rights adversaries and, most importantly, it’s depriving animals of complex, active environments. This applies to the big cats, too (as an aside: lions do well with their outdoors exhibit, leopards are treated, well, like leopards and where are the tigers?). And did I really need access to that pig house? I know it’s functional as is, but it’s ugly on a ‘misleading photos taken by PETA go viral on Facebook’ level of ugly. Indoor exhibits aren’t really thought of as ‘exhibits’ in much of Europe, but they *are* and zoos should be thinking through how they function as exhibits, which is mostly not very well from what I’ve seen.
However, the zoo’s more recent work – the bird house, the blob bears, at least some elements of the aquarium – are up there with the best I’ve seen in the world. Berlin Zoo is up there with the very best I’ve seen in the world. And what I’ve seen in the world now runs into three figures.
