CGSwans flies north for the winter

[CGSwans]

Argh. This latest update has been hanging over my head for a week, only getting harder with every new zoo visit.

I’m going to briefly abandon chronological order of my visits to very quickly cover three small zoos I have visited in the past week, before moving on to two rather more substantial and interesting collections.

First, I made a spur of the moment decision in Paris, to revisit the Menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes. I didn’t really need to revisit - it’s not a top-tier European collection and it hasn’t substantially changed since my visit in 2017, but I hadn’t slept well and wasn’t feeling up to feigning an appreciation for art, so my plan to go to the Musee d’Orsay seemed like a bit of a waste. I don’t really have much to report, though I’ll note in passing that a very welcome expansion of the orang-utan exhibit is underway. The Menagerie remains a wonderful zoo given its incredible age - it does wear its antiquity rather better than London, I’m afraid.

After setting up camp for a while in Lille, the tiny Lille city zoo became an obvious place to pop in for an hour, even if it would never have made the cut for this trip on merits. It’s a fine enough little place, but emphasis on the word ‘little’, and works currently underway to renovate the rhino and zebra paddock and to build what I took to be a new tropical building, it’s currently even smaller still.

The zoo currently consists of an avenue of mostly aviary-style enclosures for various birds and small mammals, a handful of others for ruffed lemurs, arctic foxes, Parma wallabies and otters mixed with a binturong, a very nice but inevitably ibis-themed walk-through aviary, a couple of primate islands for gibbons, siamangs and capuchins, and an interesting mix of a lowland tapir and maned wolf (both active, both completely ignoring their roommate). The only reptile on display is a Greek tortoise. The whole takes maybe 30 minutes at a normal pace, an hour if you’re feeling slothful. But it’s a perfectly fine 30 to 60 minutes.

I had intended to go to Cleres but am currently a little sapped for energy (see also: not keeping up with this thread) and decided the roughly 3 hour journey from Lille was just a bit too far. So I went to Amiens instead. It had a couple of attractive features, being both much closer and reasonably small, meaning I could be a sloth for half the day, head out in the afternoon and still have plenty of time.

There’s not a great deal there - in particular there’s a surprising lack of big ABC mammals (only tigers and sea lions), which will presumably be addressed when the currently in progress expansion for an African zone is completed. But what is here is actually surprisingly good. The clear standout is the spider monkey island, where the monkeys have unrestricted access to mature tall trees. I also enjoyed the small but varied bird collection (azure-winged magpies are glorious).

Things did get a little awkward at one stage as I was passing the ground hornbill aviary. I noticed the male had a collection of leaves in his beak, so as one does I went up and asked him what he was doing with them. He didn’t answer, so I made to leave - only for him to follow me to the other end of the aviary. Curious, I doubled back, and so did he. This went on for quite a while, attracting the amused attention of other visitors and the disgust of the female ground hornbill. I hope they sorted it out.

I do have two more zoo visits to cover but they can wait to the next one, as this post is long enough.

 

[CGSwans]

So far I’ve covered (however inadequately) a series of visits to generally pleasant but admittedly minor collections, at least on a European scale. The Menagerie, Mulhouse, Besancon and Amiens are all solid local zoos, and Lille is… well, it’s fine, but it’s small.

I haven’t *only* been going to third-tier places though.

Nausicaa is in Boulogne-sur-Mer, one of those port towns you find all over the world, which lost much of their trade when container ships were invented and for which the revitalisation plan always seems to involve building an aquarium. It wasn’t on my radar in 2017, when I visited Lisbon, Valencia, Genoa, Moscow and Copenhagen, and figured I’d been to the top five public aquaria across Europe. Then Nausicaa opened the biggest tank on the continent in 2018. Rude.

Now, I’ve already written in this thread, recently and 7 years ago, about my mixed relationship with immersive design. I love the theory, but don’t buy the practice, although when done properly it does create exhibits I love. Nausicaa has a different take. In addition to being perched on the English Channel it does a terrifyingly convincing imitation of a tsunami.

I had just started on the main section of the original aquarium when it started. First, an eerie silence, representing the sea’s initial retreat from the shore before the wave breaks. And then it hits. A seemingly never-ending wave breaks all around you, the noise deafening. Instinctively, you fight against the current, try to resist the tide. But the only safe place is high ground, so there was nothing else for it. As the onslaught of French primary school kids - each dressed in a fluorescent yellow vest as if you couldn’t hear each one from a mile away, as if they aren’t setting off seismographs and triggering beach evacuations from Calais to Brest- continued to pour through the reef exhibits, all I could do was fight my way back up the stairs and wait for the rubble to be cleared away.

Once they’d passed through, I had a very pleasant time in the original aquarium, which is a generically good aquarium with all the standard exhibits you expect, plus a cool one for lanternfishes. What put Nausicaa on my radar, though, was the expansion and well, what can you really say other than that it doesn’t matter if you’ve seen them before, standing at a small side window when a giant manta ray glides past directly on the other side, just centimetres away, engulfing your entire field of vision, is one of the few zoo experiences that can genuinely cause you to skip a breath? That one fish is why I came to Boulogne, and she’s worth it.

I had originally planned to stay in the Loire Valley to return to Beauval, as well as make a first visit to a place near the very top of my list of most regretted misses from 2017: Doue-la-Fontaine. For those wondering, the absolute top spot for regretted misses goes to Bristol, which I decided I didn’t have the energy for when staying in London in the last couple of weeks of the trip. Oops.

I eventually junked the Loire plan for logistical reasons (turns out it’s almost impossible to get there from Besancon), and instead did Doue as a day trip from Paris while sacrificing Beauval, which will need to wait a little longer to make a better impression than the lukewarm one it gave last time.

I reckon I made the right choice. I didn’t visit France’s best-known and definitely most heavily-promoted zoo on this trip, but I went to the best one instead. Doue is *fantastic*. I’m not planning on ranking zoos at the end of this trip, but if I were Doue would be in the top ten in Europe, held back from the top five only by its relatively small size. It doesn’t do everything, but what it does do it does just about perfectly.

There are no fewer than four enormous walk-through aviaries, only one of them encumbered with Waldrapp ibises, and the other three each brilliant for different reasons. The (new?) African aviary with a variety of smaller birds is a riot of sound and colour. The okapi sanctuary, which I believe pre-dates the similar (but much less lushly planted) exhibit in Rotterdam, is simply one of the best ungulate and best mixed species exhibits in the world. I searched in vain for the owl-faced monkeys, alas, but never mind.

I have always known about but been quietly sceptical of the famous South American aviary. In one sense it’s my holy grail, an enormous walk-through featuring large parrots, but I was always unsure I’d love it because of the strange quarry aesthetic. It *is* strange but I don’t care: seeing large flocks of macaws and Patagonian conures in full flight overhead is a magical zoo experience. And if that’s not enough, Doue tucks an outstanding, winding penguin exhibit in here just for fun.

I’m not doing big reviews on this trip - it’s hard enough writing anything at all - so I will quickly gloss over a series of world-class exhibits for, well, almost everything at the zoo. The primate islands are all gorgeous. The big cat exhibits generous and lush (although I wonder how often the lions bother climbing the limestone outcrops in their new exhibit - I reckon geladas and ibex would make better use of it). Even usual after-thought species like sousliks become captivating features here, with an enormous exhibit with a souslik popping up through the grass here and there.

All it wants is a high-quality reptile house and (being greedy now) maybe a small aquarium. Would the limestone tunnels, themselves an extraordinary unique feature at the world’s only self-proclaimed “troglodyte zoo” not be the perfect place for some reptile terraria?

Doue might live in Beauval’s shadow, but I’m fine with that and I suspect so is Doue. Let the masses have their McDonald’s. I’ve found the zoo equivalent of haute-cuisine.

 

[lintworm]

The okapi sanctuary, which I believe pre-dates the similar (but much less lushly planted) exhibit in Rotterdam,

Yep, Doue opened its aviary in 2013, Rotterdam followed suit in 2015, by repurposing an existing aviary.

The (new?) African aviary with a variety of smaller birds is a riot of sound and colour.

This aviary opened in 2021 indeed and together with the aardvark enclosure is the (for now) last big addition to the zoo. It has been quite silent in recent years, so who knows what they are secretly designing these days...

 

[CGSwans]

Friends, I’m making the difficult decision to put this thread on indefinite hiatus. I’ve had some wonderful highlights in the past couple of weeks:
- arguably my last first-time visit to a European colossus, the rather ‘unique’ Pairi Daiza (motto: ‘what if more really is…. more?).
- a first-time visit to Crocodiles of the World and the delightful Cotswold Wildlife Park. I described Doue above as ‘haute-cuisine’. At the risk of murdering the metaphor even further, Cotswold really is the Devonshire tea and Pimm’s with lemonade of zoos. Both visits were made infinitely more enjoyable by being shared with former ZooChat user Sooty Mangabey.
- on the subject of meeting friends, I very much enjoyed a day out and about with our resident medievalist @TeaLovingDave.
- no quick trip to the UK is complete without a return visit to Chester, which I rated the best zoo in Europe seven years ago. I’m still comfortable with that assessment.

Today I visited Avifauna in the Netherlands. I am still plodding along, but despite all those genuinely good days, I’m also battling a bit, and I’ve decided writing needs to take a back seat for now, and probably the rest of the trip. I hope you understand.