Day 2: Questioning the reality in Leipzig
@TeaLovingDave hidden gems score:
Ansell's Mole-rat - not seen
Eastern Common Chimpanzee - seen
Sierra Leone green pigeon - this was some sort of a joke right Dave? You couldn't mean this seriously
Grizzled giant squirrel - not seen
Siberian musk deer - seen
Vietnamese small flying fox - seen
Quote of the day (repeated many many times throughout the day): "
Are you f*****g kidding me?"
Magdeburg on day 1 set the bar at a reasonable level and we knew Leipzig will be even better but we didn't how much and it's safe to say that what happened was much more than we could ever imagine. Being accommodated 15 minutes by foot from the zoo allowed us to sleep a little longer and regain as much energy as possible...at least that was the plan. What really happened was that I woke up at 5 AM and couldn't sleep since so...yeah...
Anyways, we got to the zoo just as the gate opened, and being the only ones without little children there, we used our speed advantage to be the first people to come through turnstiles that day
Plan for the start of the day was set many days before - don't stop anywhere and rush straight to Gondwanaland so our cameras won't get too cold. On the way, we really didn't miss out on much, Howler monkeys and marmosets, weren't allowed outside because of frozen water moat, it was too cold for macaws, mynas and other birds from the Bird house to be outside, apart from
Swinhoe's pheasant and
Black-faced ibis and too soon for the
Sloth bear (but we did see him later in the day)
Then we finally arrived to the Gondwanaland. Just the mine you go through at the beginning is impressive enough with its aquariums with 3
lungfish species, Nocturnum with
Kowaris,
Quolls and
Slow-loris (although we'd seen only Kowari). Then we entered the main hall of Gondwanaland...and we immediately stopped with our jaws dropped...You can hear about it, you can look at the photos, but once you see something like this with your own eyes, it's much more different. We put our jackets and backpacks into the locker room (great idea to have something like that, we really appreciated it) and we headed into the hall. After seeing
Fulvous whistling ducks flying 20 meters above me in formation I knew that we see the pigeon Dave talked about only if he flies straight into my face...Gondwanaland itself is an all day thing if you are really on the hunt for the species but we rather enjoyed the surroundings so we missed out on so much of the small birds, but I didn't really mind as seeing six massive
Arapaima,
White-faced saki jumping in full-grown trees,
Radjah shelduck bathing in the waterfall,
Giant otters swimming in the pool that would be good enough to house Boto and many more sightings fills you with so much joy and happiness...We spent almost an hour and a half here (we saved some time by not going on the boat tour which was closed that day) to come back later in the day.
Anyways, out from the warm Gondwanaland back into the cold Leipzing morning, to meet some Czech animal friends (either born here, or spending part of their life here), but we are still not sure if one of the
Snow leopards we saw was the Pilsen born female or not. The Himalaya exhibit, even though it's not the biggest, is very well made. Next up was the
Elephant exhibit with former Prague's male. Bulls were just coming outside from the house so we did saw him. We got momentarily angry while bypassing the fence blocking the path to Elephant house, which meant final confirmation that there will be no pangolins today
I noticed on the plan of Elephant house that it looks like there is a separate entrance to the basement with pangolins, where you don't go through the Elephant floor so I was a bit sad that they didn't leave that one open but I can understand that it's probably better for the staff to close the whole pavilion rather than risk that someone while on the hunt for sensational photos of baby elephant won't respect some rope in front of the stairs...around the elephant exhibit through the exhibits for
Siberian tiger (Pilsen born female) and
Amur leopard, which were, same as the Snow leopard's exhibit, not the biggest, but very pretty, and around the
Red-necked wallaby exhibit, we got to
Pongoland.
As
@FunkyGibbon mentioned here, once you see a big group of chimps rather than the classic 4-5 animals, they became a completely different animal, that we learned in Magdeburg. Pongoland taught us, that there is one more level beyond that - babies. Baby chimps change the dynamics of the group in a way no amount of adults can. So we spent next hour here, having fun with the apes (but not the Gorillas, they are boring
), nice touch was the face-app camera which can you use to identify members of the main chimp group, although as we found out it could probably use some more calibrating so it won't identify male as a female...we did saw the
Eastern chimpanzees, so the only thing in this house we missed out on were free-flying birds but at this point I seriously doubt their existence, or maybe they are there, nobody cares about that because why would you when you can look at the big amazing groups of your closest relatives, maybe they are living the lives of renegades, living off the scraps apes leave in the exhibits...even their signage is like...meh. The only thing I didn't like here exhibit-wise was the fact that
Bonobos felt like Cinderellas of the house to me...All the groups have those big open exhibits and then there are the Bonobos hidden in sort of a dark spot like they've been fitted in last minute. The exhibit is still great though.
From Pongoland we went around the
Musk deer exhibit, with the deer resting not in the shelter but ON the shelter (probably wanted to have some higher ground over the cranes?), around the empty Okapi exhibit (surprise surprise) to the Giraffe house, where came probably the worst moment of the whole trip...I mean when it comes to animal smells, I can handle a lot but the nesting
Lesser flamingo colony was way too much even for me, I understand that you can't disturb the birds during this period, so, I'm sending my deepest condolences to whoever will be cleaning it after the flamingoes will be finally allowed outside. As I mentioned at the beginning of my post, we, unfortunately, didn't see
Ansell's mole-rats, but the expositions for
Fat sand rat and
Short-eared elephant shrew were very pretty.
Jumping a bit now, as there is no need for me to write how much I was overwhelmed by almost every single exhibit and how every single animal had some enrichment things in the exhibit, even those I wouldn't expect to have something like
Lownland Anoa, I will move to the old houses
Bird house and
Terrarium. In bird house, I was a bit surprised how tight some of the exhibits, or let's be honest terrariums, were (for example
Blue honeycreeper and the second one was probably
Brazilian tangar but I didn't mark it), but hey, I'm no expert. But the walkthrough hall was amazing, a little bit resembling the Sichuan house in Prague or Bird World in Dvur Kralove before they ruined it.
Terrarium a couple nice species in very nice terrariums, featuring pond for
Dwarf caiman with the biggest
Red-eared slider I have ever seen. And I'm not kidding, there was
Snapping turtle in the aquarium on the other side of the path and those two were almost the same size...I wonder what do they feed them...
Then we went to see
Koalas, where we noticed that that light there makes the glass disappear when you look from a certain angle, which sparked a discussion about the concept of walkthrough Koala exhibit. Afterwards, we headed for a second round around selected exhibits, leaving the South-American area at the very end of our visit. Here I felt like at home in Jihlava when I saw what probably will be/is inner exhibit for Coati or something like that because designing inner exhibit as a living room/kitchen/whatever...yeah I thought this is possible only here
All in all, Leipzig was everything we wanted and more. Species-wise and exhibit design-wise amazing...Some Czech zoo people say, that we are spoiled by quality of our zoos, I wonder if we are spoiled, why term do you use to describe a German person
