Almost two years after I was first supposed to go, before plans fell through at the last minute due to events out of my control, I finally arrived in Singapore yesterday.
Apart from a week in Bali, with visits to Bali Bird Park and Bali Zoo, this is my first zoo trip outside Australia. I've been starved up until now of dozens of species that are common overseas, including some that are such zoo standards that I'm sure many Zoochatters breeze on past their enclosures. For this trip, then, I've at last broken free of Australia's quarantine paranoia.
Today was supposed to be an acclimatisation day, with little planned other than a trip to the Asian Civilisations Museum (which I did do later in the day) and maybe a wander around my local area here in Little India, before delving into the zoo visits tomorrow. Events back home, though, made that plan a bit more tricky. As much as I love zoos I'm even more absorbed in Australian politics (both as an interest and for work) and the governing party, of which I am most passionately NOT a member, appears to have chosen this week to self-destruct. Great timing. I'm now expecting to spend Tuesday morning at the hostel trying to follow the premature downfall of a Prime Minister I had every intention of humbling at the ballot box next year, not being torn down by his party while I'm not even in the country to savour his ignominy at close hand. Gah.
So on a whim today (really - I was about to board the train to take me to the museum and instead took the one going the other way for the zoo precinct) I made for River Safari, to free up a bit of time later in the week. River Safari is really the least exciting of the five zoos I intend to visit, but it had the virtue of not being the venue of a big running race, as Singapore Zoo is this weekend. I expected to find RS crowded but in truth it was relatively deserted. If I get anything near similar crowds for the rest of the week I will be very happy.
River Safari is basically made up of four exhibit complexes - Rivers of the World, the giant panda building, Amazon River Quest and Amazon Flooded Forest. I'm not going to do a 'walk-through' because they just get repetitive so will just make some observations about each.
Rivers of the World - this is the most unambiguously riverine of the four exhibits and is made up primarily of freshwater aquaria for fish, reptiles and amphibians. The tanks themselves are great - big, open tanks, lightly though adequately furnished, to provide plenty of swimming room for the big fish that live in them. Mississippi paddlefish, alligator gar, Chinese sturgeon and Mekong catfish are the stars here. I'd seen alligator gars before but only juveniles - the adults are huge! As Chlidonias has mentioned in the past, though, these tanks are let down a lot by sunlight bouncing off the glass, which makes photography - already difficult enough through glass and water as it is - all but impossible. I gave up on trying.
The other main attractions of this part of the RS are crocodilians. There are three species, African dwarf crocs, Chinese alligators and Indian gharials, all of which were lifetime firsts for me. There are two gharials (which share their exhibit, strangely, with what I think was a pig-nosed turtle), and they were massive. As big as any saltwater crocs I've ever seen. Again, photography was next to useless because of a combination of sun and turbidity of the water.
The remaining notable exhibits were:
- Alligator snapping turtles, of which I couldn't get a good view.
- Painted storks and a lesser adjutant, in a really nicely done glass-fronted aviary that was themed as a rice terrace. All this exhibit needs is regular scatter feeds and people get to see these birds displaying natural behaviours. One of the best parts of the entire park. Incidentally, these were not the only painted storks to be seen - there was also a large flock of them living wild on the banks of the reservoir adjacent to the Singapore Zoo giraffe enclosure.
- Chinese giant salamander. A dark and featureless tank in which the salamander was a dark and featureless blob. I saw it the first time I went around, and moved on in the hope it would have adopted a better viewing position when I came back. Instead it vanished altogether.
- Crab-eating macaques. A troop of at least six including one juvenile, in the glass-fronted enclosure (have you spotted that 'glass-fronted' is a thing here yet?) with a pool at the front. I wasn't lucky enough to see them fishing for crabs but there weren't any crabs I could see to be fished for anyway.
All in all - Rivers of the World was solid, with some very generous tank sizes and genuinely exciting species, but with just a couple of little design flaws that stop me giving it more than an honourable credit.
The next exhibit complex is smaller and is, I suspect, what makes this place viable as a standalone attraction. Giant pandas, of course, with their usual accompaniment of red pandas and golden pheasants. They all live in a freezer - sorry, I mean an air-conditioned building. It was so cold that the staff selling merchandise (that was all black, white and furry-looking) had to wear jackets, scarves and gloves.
I took very little interest in the pheasant aviary, which was nothing special. Nor was the red panda exhibit, I guess, but they're probably my favourite mammal and they will always win plenty of my time just for being red pandas. This enclosure had the interesting feature of including an artificial log that crosses over the visitor path into what, I presume, must be the pandas' night den. The main attraction here, though, is the two giant pandas. One was asleep when I went through but the other was surprisingly active, both eating and then roaming the enclosure at a brisk pace. Both bears appeared, from what I could tell, to have full access to three different exhibits areas, two inside and a third, smaller, outside yard. So they can get fresh air if they want it, they just have to step in the sauna to get it.
I've only ever seen giant pandas before at Adelaide. The two exhibits are quite different but I give RS the win on a points decision. The bears here had more space, of pretty much equal quality (ie, climbing opportunities, limited view areas etc) and better climate control.
I then took a slight break from animal exhibits to go on a quick cruise of the Upper Selatar Reservoir, which River Safari faces on to. This cruise gave me my first taste of Singapore Zoo, as I saw the white rhinos and giraffes. I gather I also saw part of the elephants' enclosure at Night Safari, though I didn't see any elephants.
Now back to the RS, and the most soul-crushing disappointment of the entire place. Amazon River Quest is a debacle. A rolled gold, certified waste of money, time and most of all animals. I knew not to expect a lot of this thing - a ten minute boat ride around half the zoo's mammal collection - but what I got was even less satisfying than I feared. In the first three minutes you race past peccaries, capuchins, spider monkeys (a no show), red howler monkeys (a first for me, they were much smaller than I expected), tapirs, guanacos, maned wolves and maras. But most upsetting of all for me was the giant anteater. I got shunted past the exhibit in the space of ten seconds. I saw a shadow at the back of the enclosure that I recognised as giant anteater shaped, but that was as much as I got on my first ever view of one of my bucket list species. It was worse than nothing. The feature species on this ride is the jaguars - two exhibits holding three cats between them. One I got a good view of as it was prowling along the glass. I would have loved to stay and watch, as it has been many years since I saw jaguars (does anybody know when they left Melbourne Zoo?), but of course I was there and gone again in 20 seconds. After the jags I was raced past black howler monkeys, capybaras, Caribbean flamingos and scarlet ibises. There was also a saki monkey exhibit somewhere along the ride but I can't remember whether it was before or after jaguars. Either way they were a no show.
In short - tear this thing down and start it again. Given the opportunity to walk past exhibits for these animals of the same quality as shown in the rest of the zoo and I would happily call River Safari an excellent, high value zoo, overall. As it is, they've buried more than half the mammal species at the zoo in a few minutes long, extra-fee-attached, glorified carousel. What a waste. As if to give insult to injury, it's only now that I sit and write this with the aid of the zoo map that I see I missed an exhibit for golden-headed lion tamarins, which appears to be tucked in behind the boat plaza where you go into the boat ride.
At this point, RS had some making up to do. Thankfully it managed it with the rest of the Amazonian section, which I've grouped together into the Flooded Forest section although a couple of the exhibits are better thought of as standalones. The first is for jaguarundi, another new species for me. There was one fairly active cat on display, yet again behind glass. The area on display was smallish (though not any smaller than a similar small cat would get in Australia), but if I'm not mistaken the cat had access to more space off-show to the right. A solid, if unremarkable exhibit.
Squirrel monkey forest was one of the highlights of the zoo. 22 squirrel monkeys in a walk-through, aviary style enclosure. Monkeys everywhere - criss-crossing the paths on vines overhead, crashing through the trees, walking along the handrails... And, the moment I sat on the ground to get a good photo angle, sure enough there was also one on my head. Such an improvement on the limp attempts at lemur walk throughs at Melbourne and Taronga, where the lemurs just sit on the ground trying to avoid the screaming children. I don't know if it's that squirrel monkeys are naturally more inquisitive and bolder than ring-tailed lemurs, that the supervision was alert but not paranoid as Australian zoos tend to be, or that the design leant itself more naturally to interaction. Probably all three. Anyway, it was great. On the way out of the squirrel monkeys is a lounge room sized glass-fronted enclosure for a lounge room sized anaconda.
The final major exhibit was the Flooded Forest itself. At first I was quite agitated because I walked through a tunnel that was for giant otters but I could neither see giant otters (one of the biggest attractions about this place for me) nor any sign of above-water viewing of said otters. Thankfully I found them later on. Like most exhibits here it's quite a bit more generous in size than I had come prepared to see at a Singapore zoo. Four otters that were just as much fun to watch as small-clawed otters (my only previous species) but BIG.
Of course I knew they had manatees in a large tank, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw. Maybe about ten manatees, along with 50 or so massive Amazonian river monsters including several Arapaima (a bucket list species ticked off). This is an aquarium on a scale I've only ever seen devoted to saltwater. It was magnificent, and I literally gasped as I turned the corner. You get several views into this tank. The first is from a viewing window that must be close to 200 square metres, then a couple of side views (including one that gets you quite up close and personal to the manatees by virtue of where the main feeding station is) and then finally you get to see the tank from the top. The combination of squirrel monkeys on my head, giant otters and a breathtaking final feature tank allowed me to forgive RS for the shambles that was Amazon River Quest... But I shouldn't have had to.
Tomorrow: Jurong.
Apart from a week in Bali, with visits to Bali Bird Park and Bali Zoo, this is my first zoo trip outside Australia. I've been starved up until now of dozens of species that are common overseas, including some that are such zoo standards that I'm sure many Zoochatters breeze on past their enclosures. For this trip, then, I've at last broken free of Australia's quarantine paranoia.
Today was supposed to be an acclimatisation day, with little planned other than a trip to the Asian Civilisations Museum (which I did do later in the day) and maybe a wander around my local area here in Little India, before delving into the zoo visits tomorrow. Events back home, though, made that plan a bit more tricky. As much as I love zoos I'm even more absorbed in Australian politics (both as an interest and for work) and the governing party, of which I am most passionately NOT a member, appears to have chosen this week to self-destruct. Great timing. I'm now expecting to spend Tuesday morning at the hostel trying to follow the premature downfall of a Prime Minister I had every intention of humbling at the ballot box next year, not being torn down by his party while I'm not even in the country to savour his ignominy at close hand. Gah.
So on a whim today (really - I was about to board the train to take me to the museum and instead took the one going the other way for the zoo precinct) I made for River Safari, to free up a bit of time later in the week. River Safari is really the least exciting of the five zoos I intend to visit, but it had the virtue of not being the venue of a big running race, as Singapore Zoo is this weekend. I expected to find RS crowded but in truth it was relatively deserted. If I get anything near similar crowds for the rest of the week I will be very happy.
River Safari is basically made up of four exhibit complexes - Rivers of the World, the giant panda building, Amazon River Quest and Amazon Flooded Forest. I'm not going to do a 'walk-through' because they just get repetitive so will just make some observations about each.
Rivers of the World - this is the most unambiguously riverine of the four exhibits and is made up primarily of freshwater aquaria for fish, reptiles and amphibians. The tanks themselves are great - big, open tanks, lightly though adequately furnished, to provide plenty of swimming room for the big fish that live in them. Mississippi paddlefish, alligator gar, Chinese sturgeon and Mekong catfish are the stars here. I'd seen alligator gars before but only juveniles - the adults are huge! As Chlidonias has mentioned in the past, though, these tanks are let down a lot by sunlight bouncing off the glass, which makes photography - already difficult enough through glass and water as it is - all but impossible. I gave up on trying.
The other main attractions of this part of the RS are crocodilians. There are three species, African dwarf crocs, Chinese alligators and Indian gharials, all of which were lifetime firsts for me. There are two gharials (which share their exhibit, strangely, with what I think was a pig-nosed turtle), and they were massive. As big as any saltwater crocs I've ever seen. Again, photography was next to useless because of a combination of sun and turbidity of the water.
The remaining notable exhibits were:
- Alligator snapping turtles, of which I couldn't get a good view.
- Painted storks and a lesser adjutant, in a really nicely done glass-fronted aviary that was themed as a rice terrace. All this exhibit needs is regular scatter feeds and people get to see these birds displaying natural behaviours. One of the best parts of the entire park. Incidentally, these were not the only painted storks to be seen - there was also a large flock of them living wild on the banks of the reservoir adjacent to the Singapore Zoo giraffe enclosure.
- Chinese giant salamander. A dark and featureless tank in which the salamander was a dark and featureless blob. I saw it the first time I went around, and moved on in the hope it would have adopted a better viewing position when I came back. Instead it vanished altogether.
- Crab-eating macaques. A troop of at least six including one juvenile, in the glass-fronted enclosure (have you spotted that 'glass-fronted' is a thing here yet?) with a pool at the front. I wasn't lucky enough to see them fishing for crabs but there weren't any crabs I could see to be fished for anyway.
All in all - Rivers of the World was solid, with some very generous tank sizes and genuinely exciting species, but with just a couple of little design flaws that stop me giving it more than an honourable credit.
The next exhibit complex is smaller and is, I suspect, what makes this place viable as a standalone attraction. Giant pandas, of course, with their usual accompaniment of red pandas and golden pheasants. They all live in a freezer - sorry, I mean an air-conditioned building. It was so cold that the staff selling merchandise (that was all black, white and furry-looking) had to wear jackets, scarves and gloves.
I took very little interest in the pheasant aviary, which was nothing special. Nor was the red panda exhibit, I guess, but they're probably my favourite mammal and they will always win plenty of my time just for being red pandas. This enclosure had the interesting feature of including an artificial log that crosses over the visitor path into what, I presume, must be the pandas' night den. The main attraction here, though, is the two giant pandas. One was asleep when I went through but the other was surprisingly active, both eating and then roaming the enclosure at a brisk pace. Both bears appeared, from what I could tell, to have full access to three different exhibits areas, two inside and a third, smaller, outside yard. So they can get fresh air if they want it, they just have to step in the sauna to get it.
I've only ever seen giant pandas before at Adelaide. The two exhibits are quite different but I give RS the win on a points decision. The bears here had more space, of pretty much equal quality (ie, climbing opportunities, limited view areas etc) and better climate control.
I then took a slight break from animal exhibits to go on a quick cruise of the Upper Selatar Reservoir, which River Safari faces on to. This cruise gave me my first taste of Singapore Zoo, as I saw the white rhinos and giraffes. I gather I also saw part of the elephants' enclosure at Night Safari, though I didn't see any elephants.
Now back to the RS, and the most soul-crushing disappointment of the entire place. Amazon River Quest is a debacle. A rolled gold, certified waste of money, time and most of all animals. I knew not to expect a lot of this thing - a ten minute boat ride around half the zoo's mammal collection - but what I got was even less satisfying than I feared. In the first three minutes you race past peccaries, capuchins, spider monkeys (a no show), red howler monkeys (a first for me, they were much smaller than I expected), tapirs, guanacos, maned wolves and maras. But most upsetting of all for me was the giant anteater. I got shunted past the exhibit in the space of ten seconds. I saw a shadow at the back of the enclosure that I recognised as giant anteater shaped, but that was as much as I got on my first ever view of one of my bucket list species. It was worse than nothing. The feature species on this ride is the jaguars - two exhibits holding three cats between them. One I got a good view of as it was prowling along the glass. I would have loved to stay and watch, as it has been many years since I saw jaguars (does anybody know when they left Melbourne Zoo?), but of course I was there and gone again in 20 seconds. After the jags I was raced past black howler monkeys, capybaras, Caribbean flamingos and scarlet ibises. There was also a saki monkey exhibit somewhere along the ride but I can't remember whether it was before or after jaguars. Either way they were a no show.
In short - tear this thing down and start it again. Given the opportunity to walk past exhibits for these animals of the same quality as shown in the rest of the zoo and I would happily call River Safari an excellent, high value zoo, overall. As it is, they've buried more than half the mammal species at the zoo in a few minutes long, extra-fee-attached, glorified carousel. What a waste. As if to give insult to injury, it's only now that I sit and write this with the aid of the zoo map that I see I missed an exhibit for golden-headed lion tamarins, which appears to be tucked in behind the boat plaza where you go into the boat ride.
At this point, RS had some making up to do. Thankfully it managed it with the rest of the Amazonian section, which I've grouped together into the Flooded Forest section although a couple of the exhibits are better thought of as standalones. The first is for jaguarundi, another new species for me. There was one fairly active cat on display, yet again behind glass. The area on display was smallish (though not any smaller than a similar small cat would get in Australia), but if I'm not mistaken the cat had access to more space off-show to the right. A solid, if unremarkable exhibit.
Squirrel monkey forest was one of the highlights of the zoo. 22 squirrel monkeys in a walk-through, aviary style enclosure. Monkeys everywhere - criss-crossing the paths on vines overhead, crashing through the trees, walking along the handrails... And, the moment I sat on the ground to get a good photo angle, sure enough there was also one on my head. Such an improvement on the limp attempts at lemur walk throughs at Melbourne and Taronga, where the lemurs just sit on the ground trying to avoid the screaming children. I don't know if it's that squirrel monkeys are naturally more inquisitive and bolder than ring-tailed lemurs, that the supervision was alert but not paranoid as Australian zoos tend to be, or that the design leant itself more naturally to interaction. Probably all three. Anyway, it was great. On the way out of the squirrel monkeys is a lounge room sized glass-fronted enclosure for a lounge room sized anaconda.
The final major exhibit was the Flooded Forest itself. At first I was quite agitated because I walked through a tunnel that was for giant otters but I could neither see giant otters (one of the biggest attractions about this place for me) nor any sign of above-water viewing of said otters. Thankfully I found them later on. Like most exhibits here it's quite a bit more generous in size than I had come prepared to see at a Singapore zoo. Four otters that were just as much fun to watch as small-clawed otters (my only previous species) but BIG.
Of course I knew they had manatees in a large tank, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw. Maybe about ten manatees, along with 50 or so massive Amazonian river monsters including several Arapaima (a bucket list species ticked off). This is an aquarium on a scale I've only ever seen devoted to saltwater. It was magnificent, and I literally gasped as I turned the corner. You get several views into this tank. The first is from a viewing window that must be close to 200 square metres, then a couple of side views (including one that gets you quite up close and personal to the manatees by virtue of where the main feeding station is) and then finally you get to see the tank from the top. The combination of squirrel monkeys on my head, giant otters and a breathtaking final feature tank allowed me to forgive RS for the shambles that was Amazon River Quest... But I shouldn't have had to.
Tomorrow: Jurong.
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