Kansas City Zoo Kansas City Zoo News

Polar Bear improving

After a recent bout with gastrointestinal illness, Nikita the male polar bear is improving and will be back on exhibit soon. “And, another day has passed and Nikita continues to improve,” Randy Wisthoff noted. “ He ate consistently today, urinated and took all of his medications again. With a bit of coaxing by his favorite treat - lard, he jumped into his indoor pool, then later he went into it on his own! These are all positive signs of improvement. While Nikita is more alert and active he is still considered by our professional veterinary team as a 1,000 pound patient and will continue to enjoy his air conditioned suite until the doctor deems him 100%.”
 
Another short note about the Red Panda twin :
July 14, 2013
Adorable Times Two at the Kansas City Zoo

KCZoo Red Panda Cubs

Two red panda cubs were born on June 26 at the Kansas City Zoo. The two male cubs weighed four ounces each just one day after birth. At their two-week checkup, they had more than doubled in size!

Dad Fagan and mom Gaila are keeping their cubs close for warmth and feeding. Youngsters generally stay in the nest for about 90 days. The zoo’s red pandas live in an air-conditioned indoor exhibit in the summer, then move outdoors to enjoy the cool winter weather. As Himalayan natives, red pandas can tolerate very cold temperatures. Zoo guests can see the male twins on a TV monitor at the exhibit.

Two-year-old Gaila came to Kansas City from the National Zoo at age one. It was recommended by the Red Panda Species Survival Plan that Gaila breed with 13-year-old Fagan. Fagan has been at the Kansas City Zoo for 12 years and fathered one cub in 2006. Cubs are extremely important to the captive population of red pandas, because there are only 116 red pandas in captivity in the United States.
Source : Zooborns
 
New Orang Exhibit Design Announced

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Disappointment

Before I start my rant about the zoo's director and their lackluster attempts at improvements, I need to say that Kansas City is my hometown zoo and will always be important to me. Perhaps I feel jealous because of the presence of St. Louis, Omaha, and even the Sedgwick County Zoo all of which are top 10-15 zoos in the nation with great examples of animal exhibits, but KC just doesn't stack up. The zoo's master plan in the '90s was flawed, but it had loads of promise. It brought both Australia (an above average exhibit with a good collection of Aussie animals with one of the best kangaroo exhibits) and Africa (one of the largest zoo exhibits ever built with individual exhibits for lions, cheetahs, black rhinoceros, African elephant, hoofstock, gorillas and chimpanzees that are among the best, if not the best of their kind). Not getting to see the plans for Asia (which I actually haven't ever seen, so if anyone has access to those I would be very happy if you could send them to me ;)) come to fruition. I just imagine the habitats for tigers, orangutans, snow leopards, indian rhinos, sloth/sun bear, etc. that could have been, but alas, I'm getting off track. Randy Wisthoff, the zoo's director since 2004, could have been great. He served directly under Lee Simmons in Omaha and was there for the construction of their good to brilliant exhibits including The Lied Jungle, Scott Aquarium, Desert Dome, Kingdoms of the Night, and the Gorilla Valley (?). Surely one would think that he could bring about some promising change, but nearly every project he has done has been both juvenile and not as good as it could have been. I really like the entrance to the zoo and the adjacent Trumpeter Swan/River Otter exhibits, these were great additions to the zoo. However, he brought tigers back and exhibited them in the dreadful Cat Walk, the polar bear exhibit was neither very large nor was it creative in its design, and the Tropics House was pretty disappointing when it was advertised as an indoor rainforest. That it is not. Then, in 2011, when the new master plan was released by PGAV I was not impressed by what it included (None of the latest master plans designed by PGAV have impressed me, am I alone in this thinking?). Hopefully Penguin Plaza will be good; the designs by the Portico group look excellent and I have high hopes for this addition, but the new orangutan plans, while being necessary and a HUGE improvement, don't look very game-changing to me. It includes playground equipment and golf course style lawns in the designs!!! This might just be my opinion, but I really do think that the zoo could be better than it is.
 
This is an interesting analysis, and one which, on the evidence of the pictures posted here, seems pretty fair - that proposed orang enclosure looks like something that would have been built in the 1970s.

I've not been to the KC zoo since the early 1990s, but, over the course of a few years from the late '80s onwards, I was able to visit many times. In that era it really was an awful zoo - the famed ape house, some tiny cat enclosures, a pretty basic African savannah thing, the old tropical house - and not much else. At the time, I would have ranked Topeka - let alone Omaha, Wichita and St Louis - as a better zoo. So, over the past two decades, the zoo has made enormous progress - even if some of the latest exhibits are, as Jaguarundi suggests, rather disappointing.
 
The newest exhibit to be built at the KC Zoo, Helzberg Penguin Plaza will open to the general public on October 25. The exhibit features a 100,000 gallon indoor "cold-water" exhibit with king, Gentoo and rockhoppers as well as a 40,000 gallon indoor/outdoor temperate exhibit for Humboldt penguins. The moon jelly tank is 1300 gal. The reef tank is approx. 3200 gal. There is 70 linear feet of view in the warm exhibit and 114 linear feet of viewing in the cold exhibit. The sub-Antarctic exhibit is 2853 sf. and the Humboldt exhibit is 1852 sf. Helzberg Penguin Plaza will open with around 50 birds in total, capacity is over 100 birds. You can see pictures on their Facebook page.
 
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