Zoo Wroclaw Wroclaw zoo news 2020

Memorable choice to honor your 200th zoo .And you been rewarded to see the Red-and-White Flying Squirrel in the middle of the day. As far as I know, this doesn't happen very often. Is the Hammerheaded Fruit Bat aviary in the Congo Rainforest ?
 
lintworm said:
I also saw the Madagascar Fruit Bats in the lovely Madagascar house, as well as a very active pair of White-tailed Antsangy, great additions. The highlight was however the Red-and-White Flying Squirrel which was visible in the middle of the day without any warning....
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Any photographs of the fruitbats and the Antsangy?

lintworm said:
For the species collectors that have Yellow Baboon on their lifelist after a visit to Wroclaw, I have bad news. All baboons here are Olive Baboons, though there might still be some OliveXYellow hybrids, but for sure no real ones here...
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When I visited (almost exactly) a year ago with @ShonenJake13 we spent about half an hour picking through the baboon troop and working out what each individual was - I think our eventual conclusion was that there was (at the time anyway) a single Yellow remaining, perhaps 6 or 7 Olive, and everything else was a hybrid.

Well, I say "we" - it was pretty much all down to Jake's abilities!
 
lintworm said:
I also saw the Madagascar Fruit Bats in the lovely Madagascar house
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Did all the bats look like the one pictured in the Wroclaw Zoo gallery? Because it doesn't look like a Madagascar Flying Fox to me, compared to photos of wild bats. I imagine you have seen them in Madagascar?
 
Chlidonias said:
Did all the bats look like the one pictured in the Wroclaw Zoo gallery? Because it doesn't look like a Madagascar Flying Fox to me, compared to photos of wild bats. I imagine you have seen them in Madagascar?
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Well, they were all wild-caught in Madagascar, so..... :P
 
TeaLovingDave said:
When I visited (almost exactly) a year ago with @ShonenJake13 we spent about half an hour picking through the baboon troop and working out what each individual was - I think our eventual conclusion was that there was (at the time anyway) a single Yellow remaining, perhaps 6 or 7 Olive, and everything else was a hybrid.
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I would be interesting in seeing a picture of the Yellow one. There was a lot of Olive on my visit and some hybrid baboons that looked more like Olive than Yellow...

I do have pictures of the Madagascar Fruit Bat and the Antsangy, but the Hammerheaded ones were impossible to photograph properly

Chlidonias said:
Did all the bats look like the one pictured in the Wroclaw Zoo gallery? Because it doesn't look like a Madagascar Flying Fox to me, compared to photos of wild bats. I imagine you have seen them in Madagascar?
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I haven't seen these in the wild, my boat trip to an island with them got cancelled. But I see what you mean, as they have less white on their belly than in some of the pictures (but not with others...). They do however look completely different from any other fruit bat I have seen and given the origin of the animals is a guy that imports loads of stuff from Madagascar, so I don't doubt their origin, will upload another picture of them soon.
 
Your 200th zoo. Gratulations!:) Maybe I can handle it that it will also my 200th... although I presume this goal will not be reached before next year:(
 
lintworm said:
The Afrykarium is really an impressive work of architecture and I very much like the theme, but as a whole, the building doesn't convince me. Most enclosures are very generous in size (land part of the Common Hippos excepted...), but they are often just that: big. The aquaria are mostly barely furnished and look bare. This is especially acute in the Red Sea tank. Instead of coral sand on the bottom, there is just concrete, combined with subpar lightning and only a few bits of rockwock and extremely annoying crossviewing, this tank just doesn't work. It has the size and the species line-up (though signage was absent), to be a fantastic tank, but it is let down by its design. If they would have copied a bit more from the very similar lagune tank (in terms of lay-out and visitor path) in Burgers' Ocean, it could have been a better version of that tank... The manatee tank had similar problems and just felt like a simple concrete tank without variation in depth and barely any structure. The size is there, but so much more would have been possible to make it more attractive. Given the increase in visitor numbers, the building seems to be loved by the general public, but from a nerd perspective there are so many missed opportunities in design, I cannot really love this building. The new Hammerheaded Fruit Bat aviary is great though, extremely tall and well planted. I saw 3 bats as well as 2 Congo Peafowl and a pair of Schalow's Turaco.
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I have uploaded a whole bunch of pictures of the Afrykarium and the rest of Wroclaw zoo and thought I would illustrate why the Afrykarium doesn't work for me. To do that I will compare the Red Sea tank of Wroclaw with the Lagune tank in Burgers' Zoo. Both are the first tank of the respective aquaria and while the tank in Wroclaw is bigger, it's design is very flawed. If you look on the maps of the respective building, the lay-out is extremely similar, with a path winding around 270 degrees of the tank.

First Wroclaw:

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You descend slowly underwater with the first views into the tank, on the left out of view is a beach with some tortoises.

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Once completely submerged you get a good first view into the tank

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Then there are multiple more viewing windows into the tank

Compare that to the Lagune in Burgers'

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The journey here also starts above water

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you then descend

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and underwater there are several viewing windows as well

Most importantly is that in the Burgers' Zoo tank is that there is 0 cross-viewing between the 6 different view points, only when you start recognizing certain rocks / fake corrals one starts to notice where one is respective to the other viewing windows. In fact all the rock work has been placed in such a way to give a sense that this tank is much larger than it is and only at closer inspection it becomes clear that a clever landscape architect has fooled you.

Secondly the tank in Burgers' Zoo has much better lighting, whereas the Wroclaw tank feels like a dark cavern. And third there is a huge difference in structuring the tank, in Wroclaw there is no substrate, just concrete on the bottom and there is very little coral theming present at all. To me this is the prime example of why I don't think Afrykarium is a great buidling. When building with such a budget and size, one should expect that a landscape architect was involved that knows his stuff and have people that give love to the building.

There are a whole bunch of new pictures from the Wroclaw zoo here:
Zoo Wroclaw - ZooChat
 
Ned said:
I very much enjoyed looking through your photos, looks like the kind of zoo I'd need at least two days to get around.
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I could comfortably see everything in one day, but there are enough reasons to spend two days here. The zoo has one of the most diverse collections in Europe (only a bit lacking in birds) in a set of enclosures that has everything from bold modern architecture to monumental buildings. There is the whole range of good, bad and ugly, as the zoo is very much in transition (currently the bird house is being completely renovated). Well worth a look
 
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