Finally,CG, a zoo director friend who visited the Melbourne Zoo recently surprised me (i dont really know why) by saying he thought it was one of the best he had ever seen.My one and only trip to Australia didnt include anywhere below Sydney so i have that one still to do..when i do we will have to have a beer..... and you will find out that im only slightly strange!
Wait, what? There's a Melbourne in Florida as well, perhaps he went there and you got your wires crossed?
I live a life full of resentment towards Melbourne Zoo. I am looking in the rear view mirror, of course, at a zoo I knew as a child. But I genuinely believe the Melbourne Zoo of the mid-1990s was on a track that could have placed it comfortably in the world's top ten zoos. It had been modernising steadily since the mid-1960s (the lion park) and had only a couple of seriously problematic exhibits left (most notably the elephants).
The reptile house and the great flight aviary stil survive and sit comfortably with the best in their classes that I've seen. But the gorilla rainforest has been severely degraded, and the treetop apes and monkeys are suffering death by a thousand cuts. They are the last significant elements left from that zoo I loved so much, apart from the butterfly house (which I've always been indifferent towards).
With the (partial) exception of the orangutan exhibit pretty much everything since 2000 has been botched to a greater or lesser degree. And worse, the zoo has consciously run its collection into the ground. Australian zoos will never - can never - be as diverse as their European or North American brethren. But they had a choice about how they would confront the challenge, and the decision appears to have been to see how few exotic animals they can get away with displaying and still have people come through the gates.
I just did some quick counting in my head and I think there's 12 species of primate that would be 'ongoing' parts of the plan, ten species of carnivore (including the native fur seals), the elephants, five species of ungulates (two of which likely won't be replaced when the current ones die) and maybe two rodents. But, I hear you ask, what about the natives? There's only the stock standard kangaroos, koalas, wallabies, Tassie devils, tree kangaroos, wombats, echidnas and platypus. Maybe a bilby too. They won't want to go into more depth than that because they want tourists to go to Healesville instead. Birds? There's now the Great Flight Aviary and about five small habitat or species-specific aviaries.
I think the new precinct 'Predator something or other' will be open when I get home. It won't have any new species, and indeed a zone that relatively recently held brown bears, a tiger, snow leopards, a Persian leopard, a jaguar and maned wolves (and further back in time, also cheetahs) will hold tigers and snow leopards. I'm not all that excited to see what they've done. None of those previous exhibits were even close to being sub-par by European standards, by the way. The leopard deserved more space, but they always do. The rest were fine.
It's typical of their approach. They knocked down the decrepit baboon exhibit, as well as a few other bits and pieces. They went from displaying at one point four species of callitrichids to I think just one, and in return we got a new baboon enclosure (decent, I'll concede) and 'Growing Wild', a wasteland of meerkat exhibits (to go with the two we already had), a giant tortoise yard (to go with the one we already had), a mara and quokka walkthrough that, as of my last visit, had neither quokkas or mara in it and a bush turkey aviary. It's a pretty bloody expensive turkey, in both senses of the word.
The Victorian Government's policy of providing free entry for children a few years ago was a disaster. The incentive for the zoo to pursue parents with young children as their only real target market was set in stone that day. The zoo started to be dumbed down. They no longer strive for anything approaching cutting edge exhibit design, and they seem happy to spend millions of dollars and have the final product still cut corners for no discernible reason. The penguin pool in the Wild Seas thing - you'd hate it, it's SeaWorld outside and a bloody IMAX theatre inside - has bare concrete walls with a square hole cut in it. This complex cost $20m. Spend an extra couple of thousand bucks and texture that surface a little. It's hard for me to describe but if/when you see it you'll understand. It's like they *want* everything to look amateurish.
We went, I think, from being an ultra-progressive European zoo in my childhood to being a medium-sized US zoo. We don't compare ourselves with Vienna anymore, but with, say, Atlanta. And if you haven't already figured it out, that really pisses me off.
The discussion on the merits of Berlin Zoo have been apt, as in my mailbox today was a new hardcover publication (by Gary Bruce) called Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo. Glancing through the book in front of me, I feel compelled to make a few observations:
But I'd rather go to Hagenbeck, and not just because of its venomous critters.