Wellington Zoo video of the zoo's history

[Chlidonias]

This is a really interesting video I came across in Youtube from 2012. It may have been on Zoochat before, but I don't recall it. There are some interesting stories and clips in here, including video of a family of demoiselle cranes. I remember the old concrete-and-bars cages still in use for various animals when I first visited, especially the monkeys (in the video they show them for the big cats and chimps but the others were similar).

 

[Chlidonias]

the first seven minutes of this video also show parts of the zoo as it looked in the early 1990s.

 

[zooboy28]

Those are both interesting videos @Chlidonias, although some of the stories in the first are not very good, the one about the sun bear is particularly awful! But it does show some interesting historical images.

Whereabouts were the old lion cages shown in the film?

 

[Chlidonias]

Those are both interesting videos @Chlidonias, although some of the stories in the first are not very good, the one about the sun bear is particularly awful! But it does show some interesting historical images.

Whereabouts were the old lion cages shown in the film?

I thought the stories were all good ones. The sun bear story must have been late 70s I think - when I first went there (mid-80s), the two bear "pits" had an American black bear on one side and the other side had small-clawed otters because the last Asiatic black bear had recently died. I honestly don't remember lions at all, so couldn't say if those cages in the video were still there. They had a pair of Siberian tigers though, which I think were the same tiger enclosures as today (there was a glassed viewing area). The concrete-and-bars cages I remember had primates (spider monkeys, baboons, etc - these are the cages seen in the second video) as well as smaller mammals like raccoons, kinkajous, and Geoffroy's cat.