Denver Zoo Denver Zoo News 2019

Denver Zoo stays losing!

Big Changes Coming to Great Apes - Denver Zoo

"At the recommendation of the SSP, our family gorilla troop—Jim, 31, Tinga, 14, and Whimsie, 3—recently moved to Jacksonville Zoo to join one of their resident females in the hopes they grow their family, while our resident bachelors—Charlie, 23, and Curtis, 24—will remain at Denver Zoo for the foreseeable future. Having one troop in Great Apes rather than two will allow our animal care team to better train the gorillas to participate in their own medical care."

The gorilla habitat is massive, and now it's only going to have two bachelor males.
 
I visited a couple weeks ago and saw the sarus crane chick. Very cute. Also they had 4/5 bulls in the amphitheater space with only Bohdi missing. He’s been in musth for many months now. Jake and Chuck were playing with Billy much of the time and were keeping him from exiting the pool. Apparently when all 3 are together, Billy tends to get ganged up on. Groucho grabbed a bale of hay and left the youngsters to themselves. I’m also excited to say they did finally add some foliage to the new grizzly yard. Some young pine trees and shrubs. Hopefully they last. In the second grizzly yard, the glass had paper over it because apparently the remaining bear is uncomfortable with being so close to people. Understandable as they spent ~20 years in the old Bear Mountain grottos.

In other news, something will finally be done with the site of the Felines house which has been closed for 2 years. The leopards were not there when I visited and they had their American porcupine ambassador occupying one of the old cages. A stingray encounter exhibit will open in 2020 at the site. Another disappointment as the Downtown Aquarium already has one and I’d rather see progress towards polar bears returning as detailed in the master plan.

COMING SOON: Stingray Cove at Denver Zoo - Denver Zoo
 
Also the father of Tensing’s baby isn’t Bandhu the male at Denver (they’ve been trying for years without success) but Jontu at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo. The calf was produced via AI.

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Echobeast said:
In other news, something will finally be done with the site of the Felines house which has been closed for 2 years. The leopards were not there when I visited and they had their American porcupine ambassador occupying one of the old cages. A stingray encounter exhibit will open in 2020 at the site. Another disappointment as the Downtown Aquarium already has one and I’d rather see progress towards polar bears returning as detailed in the master plan.

COMING SOON: Stingray Cove at Denver Zoo - Denver Zoo
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The aquarium has a tiger, and the zoo is getting stingrays. Strange Days indeed.

The lone(?) Amur leopard was on exhibit this past Sunday, but the snow leopard cages had Quill, the above mentioned American porcupine. It seems that instead of innovating something with mesocarnivores Denver Zoo is content on copying other mid-tier zoos, and leopards get screwed out of another zoo.

While I wouldn't be adverse to polar bears returning I would rather see a proper grizzly habitat akin to Woodland Park or Oakland's. Too much of the zoo is rooted in the past -- here's a square yard with unrelated species next to each other. If I had my druthers once the bird house is demoed, the zoo would go all in on a version of Jungle World or Parc Zoologique de Paris' tropical biome.

One idea is to focus on a Madagascar exhibit. Get the lemurs out of the primate house, and give them a whiz bang free roaming exhibit space. Another was to create a larger version focusing on the Colombian Amazon. Bring in a jaguar, black piranhas, a metric tonne of birds, etc. Some other New World monkeys too. They could all have a free roaming habitat.

Anyway, a couple of quick notes:

-- a carcass pole has been added to the main yard in Predator Ridge
-- the bird house is virtually empty at this point
-- the sloths will remain with the zoo for the foreseeable future. There are no definite plans on where to house them, but ideas have been floated.
-- keepers cannot clean the orangutan house, because Jaya won't transition at night; the female he's with isn't too keen on him, and won't leave him alone.
-- a small text block on the "who's who" graphic on the wall lets visitors know that Jim, Whimsie, and Tinga have been shipped to Jacksonville.
-- a keeper let slip that the zoo is expecting three new gorillas soon; she indicated that they're supposed to be bachelors.
 
drill said:
It sound like the zoo is going really downhill.
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Eh, I wouldn't say that yet. As a newcomer to the area, it feels like a tipping point. Depending on how the dice fall these current measures can end up being necessary stop gaps, or the beginning of Denver becoming virtually unidentifiable from other mid-tier zoos.
 
Denver is weird. They have a mixture of amazing and mid-level exhibits. Anyone here will say that Predator Ridge, Elephant Passage, Primate Panorama, and Tropical Discovery are all among the best exhibits of their kind in NA. I am disappointed by their recent additions of The Edge and Harmony Hill which is a sentiment shared by others in the industry. But they are also in a weird period where the zoo seems empty compared to how I know it. My childhood zoo was actually Denver as CMZ was nowhere close to the level that Denver was at the time and my parents preferred driving an hour to Denver. So I remember the zoo fondly. Today there are no Dall sheep, no polar bears, no Bird World, no Felines, and a host of other animals that have left the collection both permanently or hopefully temporarily. It’s weird for me to see the zoo like this. Go back 5 years and most people here would call Denver a top 10 zoo. Now with the recent disappointments and the rise of other mid-size zoos, Denver might not even be the best zoo in Colorado anymore. But I also have hope that new developments will move Denver back to the point it was.
 
Echobeast said:
Denver is weird. They have a mixture of amazing and mid-level exhibits. Anyone here will say that Predator Ridge, Elephant Passage, Primate Panorama, and Tropical Discovery are all among the best exhibits of their kind in NA. I am disappointed by their recent additions of The Edge and Harmony Hill which is a sentiment shared by others in the industry. But they are also in a weird period where the zoo seems empty compared to how I know it. My childhood zoo was actually Denver as CMZ was nowhere close to the level that Denver was at the time and my parents preferred driving an hour to Denver. So I remember the zoo fondly. Today there are no Dall sheep, no polar bears, no Bird World, no Felines, and a host of other animals that have left the collection both permanently or hopefully temporarily. It’s weird for me to see the zoo like this. Go back 5 years and most people here would call Denver a top 10 zoo. Now with the recent disappointments and the rise of other mid-size zoos, Denver might not even be the best zoo in Colorado anymore. But I also have hope that new developments will move Denver back to the point it was.
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CMZ does have Mountain tapir, so i thinks that beats Denver.
 
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