I visited Weltvogelpark Walsrode on Thursday the 9th of July for the full day and for a few hours on the next morning as a stopping point whilst driving from Warsaw, Poland to the UK (where I will be for the next month before driving back again). I had very high expectations for Weltvogelpark Walsrode, largely based on the species list from Zootierliste and it didn’t disappoint at all. Weltvogelpark Walsrode is my favourite zoo that I have been to so far. Of course, the collection is very specialised, birds, birds and another helping of birds is all you will see there but what fantastic birds they are. The collection has a fantastic selection of rarities and I saw close to 200 bird species that I had never seen before (over 200 with the different subspecies ... read more

Poznan Stare Zoo is the far smaller and inferior of Poznan’s two zoos. Though Stare Zoo wasn’t all bad and nothing was really terrible, just not that impressive with rather too many domestics for my liking. The Stare zoo is a very old zoo and I believe the oldest continuously operating zoo in Poland and was Poznan’s main zoo before the tiny size of the facility necessitated a larger zoo to be built though they are both under the same management. As a result the zoo has a lot of history associated with it including former exhibits that would be considered unsuitable for the species that they were originally intended for but they have since been re-purposed for other species. The entrance to the zoo is free and I believe it is officially a public park ... read more

Wroclaw Zoo is a zoo located in the City of Wroclaw in Southern Poland. The Zoo is a very large zoo and has recently undergone lots of development projects such as the Afrykarium. I really liked this zoo and if you count Afrykarium as one single exhibit than it is the best one I have ever seen. - As I just wrote, the Afrykarium is fantastic and is the best single exhibit I have ever seen. The building is huge and grand on the outside and inside including two fantastic pools for a fair sized group of cape fur seals and a huge group of African penguins (sharing with cape shelducks) but make their enclosures seem empty. There are lots of big tanks with freshwater and saltwater fish including a huge tank for sharks, rays, a ... read more

I’m just going to talk about what I liked, didn’t like and general opinions here. - I thought that the best bit of the zoo was Magic mountain/great rock. This is a sort of mock-rock mountain and the exhibits are on the inside. You come in past the exhibits for gorillas and orangs and go through a corridor with signs about evolution and species going extinct. These signs were almost all in Hungarian (not a complaint, I was in Hungary so it is only to be expected. After all, no zoos in the UK have their signage in Hungarian) so my appreciation of it was limited but I could get the general gist of what they said from pictures. The place was a sort of hybrid between a natural history museum and a small animals house. ... read more

Today, I did Ostrava Zoo. I will not be doing an exhibit by exhibit 50 million word review but I will be generally discussing the zoo – the good points, bad points and my general opinions. Ostrava Zoo is located in Ostrava (obviously) which is a city in the Czech Republic and fairly near to the Polish border. I’m going to be honest here and say that Ostrava is really quite a depressing city, it is an industrial city and the skyline is covered with the towers of factories, some are shut-down and rusting and some are still bellowing smoke. There used to be lots of coal mining going on around the city (though this has stopped now, I believe completely) and as a result there are lots of huge slag heaps and old railways for ... read more