Things that you don’t like about your home zoo

Lake District Wildlife Park, in Bassenthwaite, England. As much as I love the place I do have some issues with it:

- Because the focus of their collection is ungulates and rare breed livestock, most of the larger enclosures are just basic grass paddocks with not a huge amount going on in terms of scenery or animal enrichment. This makes up most of the zoo site, and a lot of it is very plain and uninteresting to look at.
- They used to have a very impressive reptile house, but today the on-show reptile collection has shrunk to two lizards, three snakes and some box turtles, displayed in a single corridor with the walls painted an ugly bright green. They do have more species, but a lot of them are kept off-show and only brought out for a daily keeper talk that's done very late on the day.
- I personally don't like it when birds of prey are tied up to a little perch out in the open with little to know weather protection, which this zoo does with many of their hawks and eagles. I'd prefer if they were all kept in their own aviaries, some of the birds are such as the owls and Vultures, but others aren't.
Tethered birds of prey are usually those that are flown free, often daily. It’s unlikely that the ones you mention are left out overnight or in bad weather. However, it’s now viewed as poor practice to tether owls or vultures, and BIAZA are now moving towards free lofting for all species.
 
Lincoln Park Zoo
  • The aardvark should really have an indoor nocturnal exhibit so guests could stand a better chance of consistently viewing the animal. The rotation with the meerkats in the day room doesn't seem good for the animal being on display.
  • The sloth/tamarin exhibit in Small Mammal-Reptile House having a river bottom emphasized seems odd to me as nothing uses the water in that exhibit, and it makes it harder to view the tree tops. The saki monkey/stingray makes more sense.
  • I really wish the zoo would (re-)add a small cat or canid/fox species back to Small Mammal-Reptile House.
 
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