Quick visit today - managed to have a little gander around the new herp house. Not a patron or a fellow but the staff at the entrance were very kind and let me in towards the end of the day. The house closes at 16:15 currently as a note for future visitors...
The Sardinian brook salamander exhibit is viewed from outside the building, and as before there's a view into an off-show area behind it with various midwife toad species I believe once again. The species lineup above sounds about right, some lovely new species but mostly familiar faces on the collection front. The entrance section is mostly amphibian-centred, with the Laos warty newts (surprisingly large...), some off-show tanks for the Cayenne caecilians, and a pretty massive exhibit for Mountain chickens. There's also exhibits for Gidgee skinks and Big-headed turtles here. There seems to be quite the breeding effort ongoing for the Big-headed turtles, as they were present in about four or five tanks in all throughout the house, two on-show and several off-show. They were also
much more showy than in the previous exhibit. Mountain chicken exhibit shown below:
Then moving through you get to the second area which is very similar to the set up in the old house. On the whole, was very pleased with the quality of enclosures here - the King cobra has been rather spoilt, the Philippine croc has managed to get himself a (comparatively to the last one at any rate) very deep pool and the Giant salamanders have two lovely exhibits and appear to have already figured out their favourite hiding spots. Was a bit tough to see some of the species but that should hopefully get easier with time as they get more settled. Exhibits all well-furnished as you'd expect, typically more or less on par with the spaces they occupied in the previous house. It's a slight upgrade for all of them for sure though.
Was really great seeing the mountain adders and pitvipers - probably two of the most beautiful snake species out there. Plus the Mountain chickens, warty newts, Titicaca frogs, mossy frogs... A lovely species lineup. Maybe the one criticism I'd make is that it doesn't feel particularly congruent or immersive - there isn't really a running theme, or something that makes it special - it might have been nice to have one flagship exhibit so to speak. It's a minor point, as I felt it worked well as a reptile house in general and you got the impression they were really playing it safe designing it, but perhaps thinking a bit more outside the box would have made it a bit more special.
Overall, definitely happy with it and nice to see all the herps again.
