Melbourne Zoo Melbourne Zoo News 2014
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she came to Taronga in 1990 from Melbourne. She was imported from Rotterdam in 1976 (at which time the spelling of her name was Coco).
If Pertinax saw no chimps c.1990 then I guess 1990 must have been the last year they were there.
According to the magazine "Zoo News", June 1993, the last of the chimps had been transferred to Taronga early in 1993. I don't know how many there were, but one had been transferred to Taronga in October 1992 to join a group going to Hyderabad, India and another had died earlier in 1992.
Not an animal-related story but a primate keeper (the zoo's first female keeper incidentally!) has marked 40 years of service: Melbourne Zoo marks a major milestone with primate zookeeper celebrating 40 years of service - 9news.com.au (sort of animal-related as she witnessed the births of the twin orangs as well as Ya Kwanza)
Just to add that jones mentioned in this thread (http://www.zoochat.com/24/chimpanzee-troop-330774/index2.html) that ex-Melbourne chimp Sandra went to Ishikawa Zoo in 1999 along with others from Taronga (via Perth). She was also originally from Rotterdam.
Dewi the Sumatran orang-utan turns four: Dewi turns four | Zoos Victoria
thanks for that. It was exactly what I needed.
Preview of Lion Gorge: Cats, dogs and crocs? Oh my! | Zoos Victoria
Also a photo gallery from The Age - http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/lion-gorge-the-pride-of-melbourne-zoo-20141218-129y0y.html
Looks interesting!
The Zoos Vic article says the African Hunting dogs are new from Perth, so what happened to the dogs that Melbourne already had?
Looks interesting!
The Zoos Vic article says the African Hunting dogs are new from Perth, so what happened to the dogs that Melbourne already had?
And this article from the Herald Sun also has some great photos - No Cookies | Herald Sun
Had a quick look this morning. Disappointing, again. The only thing wrong, from a visitor perspective, with the existing lion and hunting dog enclosures was the obtrusive mesh fences. Those are unavoidable in large carnivore enclosures, of course, but this development has done nothing at all to obscure them so I'm left wondering what the point was. The new exhibits have the cropped lawn-with-a-few-trees look. They're boring. The crocodile exhibit is 40 years newer than the old one, but no more imaginative in its design. It's just a murky pool in a building behind glass.
Melbourne has really had a long string of outs now, with exhibits that manage to look like a cheaper and more sanitised take on Australia Zoo. It's like they took the praise for Orangutan Sanctuary and thought that what visitors want is ugly over-construction throughout the zoo. Orangutan Sanctuary works because it sells a message about the damage palm oil plantations are doing to a specific habitat. A bit of stark artificiality was appropriate there, but that's no reason to inflict the same everywhere else.
The lemur walk-through looks great by comparison with Taronga's debacle, but that's damning it with faint praise. Growing Wild is completely pointless, a wasteland of unused and virtually unvisited space only two years after it was built. The Wild Sea precinct is fatally undermined by its brutalist architecture. The entire zoo is infested now with buildings that look like they escaped from a childcare centre and weren't reported missing.
Adelaide is now a better zoo, not because of its achievements but from the continuing damage inflicted on Melbourne.
Melbourne has really had a long string of outs now, with exhibits that manage to look like a cheaper and more sanitised take on Australia Zoo. It's like they took the praise for Orangutan Sanctuary and thought that what visitors want is ugly over-construction throughout the zoo. Orangutan Sanctuary works because it sells a message about the damage palm oil plantations are doing to a specific habitat. A bit of stark artificiality was appropriate there, but that's no reason to inflict the same everywhere else.
The lemur walk-through looks great by comparison with Taronga's debacle, but that's damning it with faint praise. Growing Wild is completely pointless, a wasteland of unused and virtually unvisited space only two years after it was built. The Wild Sea precinct is fatally undermined by its brutalist architecture. The entire zoo is infested now with buildings that look like they escaped from a childcare centre and weren't reported missing.
Adelaide is now a better zoo, not because of its achievements but from the continuing damage inflicted on Melbourne.
I had to read your mini rant about Melbourne Zoo several times as I was a tad surprised at your seemingly vehement disgust at what has occurred at the zoo during the past decade. My one and only visit to the zoo was in 2007 and I was duly impressed. However, that was obviously before the lemur walk-through area (which doesn't look that bad at all), Wild Sea, Growing Wild, Lion Gorge and the baboon exhibit (perhaps most impressive of all). What do you think of the new baboon accommodation? When I was there those primates were shunted to the side in an awful chain-link cage that brought back memories of an earlier zoological epoch.
From photos the brand-new, $5.6 million Lion Gorge complex does appear a bit "boring" but the use of large viewing windows is surely an excellent addition to that enclosure. Wild Sea does come across as a bizarre concept as the cement outcroppings in the seal pool are not textured or naturalistic whatsoever. What is up next for one of the world's oldest zoos? Snow leopards and Syrian brown bears receiving updated exhibits?
My first thoughts (from afar) are that it seems to be alot of money spent on a mish-mash of exhibits with no clear definition in theme (Predators is pretty poor as a concept, particularly if you don't have ones for other feeding guilds). The two 'main' exhibits seem to be designed to hold bachelor groups only. As both species are duplicates with Werribee why not have just do one good exhibit well?
I knew MZ well in my youth, mostly as a beautiful large gardened zoo. It would seem that the high standards have slipped a bit...
I knew MZ well in my youth, mostly as a beautiful large gardened zoo. It would seem that the high standards have slipped a bit...
The recent history of design at Zoos Victoria has followed a twisted path mirroring the convoluted management changes at the organization. In the early 90s, the influence and direct involvement of David Hancocks was evidenced in a series of "classic" immersion exhibits, like the Gorilla rainforest in Melbourne and the central savanna, lion and hippo exhibits at Werribee.
About ten years ago, a strongly opinionated board member insisted on moving away from "American-style" exhibit design and instead insisted on developing an "Australian modern" architectural vocabulary, leading to such developments as the Wild Seas, the "golden egg" platypus extravaganza and the Animal rescue center/hospital at Healesville.
More recently, new leadership has transformed ZV, and it has thrived and blossomed as a conservation-focused organization. However, there has been little interest in (or expertise shown) in exhibit design, and I would categorize almost all of the newer projects as basically "meh" efforts. Perfectly acceptable from a welfare perspective, but lacking aesthetic sensitivity or innovation.
My objections are more to the totality of developments over the past decade or so than to any one exhibit. The lemur walk-through isn't bad per se, and I think my initial reaction upon seeing it for the first time with Chlidonias was fairly positive. But it's still just a few lemurs sitting on the ground, in front of a concrete wall. They only seem to use a small portion of the exhibit, at least while visitors are around. Unused space in an exhibit is a sign of failure to me. The ruffed lemur enclosure next to it is much worse. You look down on the lemurs from above, and they don't really have much incentive to climb so they have been curled up on the ground every time I've seen them since they moved. And that ground is, bizarrely, partly covered by black pebbles.
I realise I did neglect to mention the large glass viewing windows into the lion exhibit (I was thinking of the hunting dog enclosure when I wrote it, as well as the failure to even attempt to screen any of the big black fence behind the lions). But the main viewing window is inside an echoey building (another unnecessary building!) that also has a view into the (as yet unoccupied) croc enclosure and a couple of small terraria (which seem to be the zoo's way of justifying all these pointless rooms). The damn thing has a single glass door that creates a traffic jam in and out. There's just been no thought to amenity at all.
I'm wondering what happens to ideas at Melbourne. Growing Wild was supposed to have a stage II. What happened to it? Early signage indicated strongly that P̶r̶e̶d̶a̶t̶o̶r̶-̶P̶r̶e̶y̶ ̶P̶r̶e̶d̶a̶t̶o̶r̶s̶ ̶Lion Gorge was going to be a rotation exhibit. That's clearly not happening.
I also despise the noise pollution that has appeared in the zoo. There are two particularly annoying examples I can think of. I've complained before about the audio-visual display in Wild Sea (that has animated whales and dolphins etc), and the piped in whale sounds on the main drive outside the complex. There's also a thing set up near the gorillas that is meant to encourage people to recycle phones for their coltan. A worthy message, but it didn't need to be done with a constant stream of piped in ringing sounds. The gorilla forest used to be the only immersive complex in the zoo but not anymore.
As Tetrapod said, the Melbourne Zoo of my childhood was simpler but it had more exhibits and, importantly, far more vegetation. It was softer, visually, than it is now. There are cheap (and some expensive!) and ugly buildings all over the place. It seems the current director can't bear the thought of visitors not having an education building, function room or shop in their direct line of sight. And that's before you get to the frankly ugly exhibits all over the place or the sheer amount of walking between exhibits. I overheard one guy complaining that he'd been at the zoo for half an hour and hadn't seen an animal, and it's a fair criticism. One of Melbourne's assets is its large open spaces not taken up by exhibits (something Adelaide and Taronga don't have), but when you've rationalised the collection down massively you're left with long gaps between exhibits.
If you look past the flashy price tags, you'd hate the new Melbourne Snowleopard.
Zoos should be about the animals, not flashy, grandiose exhibits. Taronga, unfortunately, is going a bit that way also. It seems to me that often the animals are just an excuse for impressive architectural efforts.
Keep the enclosures as unobtrusive as possible, concentrate on the animals and you will have a good zoo...
Keep the enclosures as unobtrusive as possible, concentrate on the animals and you will have a good zoo...