Camping under the stars and waking to the sight of giraffes drinking at a watering hole and hearing the distant roar of lions could become a reality under a plan to transform Hamilton Zoo.
From its humble beginnings as a game farm, work has started to reinvent the city's second-most-popular visitor destination over the next decade which could see the return of several popular species.
City councillors will be presented with a draft zoo master plan in November with the overall goal to maintain and boost visitor numbers.
Ideas to come out of zoo discussions so far include: "glamping" [luxury camping] on the zoo grounds; building a cafe or function centre overlooking the entire site; the reintroduction of otters and lions; and creating a shared entranceway with nearby Waiwhakareke Natural Heritage Park.
The master plan is budgeted to cost $80,000.
Hamilton Zoo director Stephen Standley said the draft plan was "still only ideas" but was an attempt to refresh the zoo. "Zoos inevitably have to keep reinventing themselves, but we don't want to be another Auckland Zoo, we want to be Hamilton Zoo and that's the critical thing."
In one initiative, corporate groups and visitors could camp overnight at the zoo and do "animally" activities during the day.
"You can imagine waking up in the morning, drawing the curtains back and there's a giraffe, legs splayed out, drinking at a watering hole and in the background you may have lions roaring," Standley said.
But any master plan had to be sustainable and cost controls had already ruled out pandas and elephants.
"We want to come up with a plan that's not uber-expensive but makes the most of the site and makes the most of the species we have," Standley said.
Former Hamilton mayor Russ Rimmington, who campaigned to bring pandas to the city in 2001, said such an initiative would have attracted hundreds of thousands of tourist dollars to the Waikato. However, he added that bringing pandas to Hamilton needed a champion to drive it and the opportunity was now lost.
Hamilton Zoo's point of difference was its endangered animals such as its white rhinoceros, he said.
Standley said Adelaide Zoo acquired two giant pandas in 2009 but the associated costs had left them with a $23 million debt.
"To get giant pandas, you have to pay $1m a year and a lot of money has to go into not just housing the pandas but all the auxiliary stuff and it has to happen all at once," he said. "Purely from a cost perspective it doesn't make sense."
Elephants were also off the zoo's shopping list because of their high maintenance costs.
"If we had 250,000 visitors a year, then elephants might be an option . . . It's not fair to have one or two elephants, they've got to be in a herd and you have to give them the opportunity to breed. At 120,000 visitors a year we can't go there, we would break the zoo."
The zoo's focus would, however, remain on exotic species.
Only 7 to 8 per cent of visitors were from overseas. "The reality is we are a zoo for New Zealanders and they want to come and see the bigger animals. We do savannah animals very well so let's capitalise on that," Standley said.
The master plan was being developed by a working group chaired by city councillor Angela O'Leary and assisted by United States-based planning and design firm Studio Hanson Roberts.
O'Leary said Hamiltonians had a close connection to the zoo, which housed "the pets we can't have at home".
Hamilton Zoo also had less concrete and more greenery than other zoos and had a special connection to the city's other green gem, the Waiwhakareke heritage park.
Friends of the Zoo member Betty Collins said the zoo was a fantastic recreational and educational resource for the region and hoped the council would support the draft master plan.
Once the Waikato Expressway was complete in 2019 and traffic could bypass Hamilton, visitors would need a reason to visit the city, she said.
"We've seen the support the council has given Hamilton Gardens and I think Hamilton Zoo is equally deserving of support from council.
"It just seems we've been in the backwaters a bit."
Hamilton and Waikato Tourism chief executive Kiri Goulter said the region's largest market was domestic visitors and the zoo was an ideal experience for them to enjoy.
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