Bahrni's Website

Wellington Zoo
Lions and Tigers and Bears... oh my!
Sunday 30th January 2005

Given the disastrous trip attempt of the week before, I was a little nervous of a repeat performance with our trip to Wellington Zoo, but instead everything went perfectly. Well, except for me slipping when parking the scooter on arrival, dropping the bike, hurting my leg and knocking the wing mirror off. I put that down to my general run-of-the-mill luck though, and not a specific example of a Bad DayTM.

For those wishing to find it, Wellington Zoo is located on the south side of the city in the suburb of Melrose, at least according to my GPS maps. The trip out there was pleasantly uneventful, parking mishaps notwithstanding, and a helpful cashier on arrival told us about upcoming talks and feedings and when and where they occurred as well as providing us with the obligatory free paper map.

The zoo is situated on a hilly area of land, but thankfully nowhere near as steep as the one housing Edinburgh Zoo back home and it's pretty easy to see everything by taking a slightly zig-zaggy loop around the park. So we did.

Our first encounter was with a black red-tailed cockatoo, which was sitting pretty in front of its glass front window and having a lackadaisical preen whilst watching the world go by. The cage, like all the enclosures that I saw, were fairly large, and seem to give the inhabitants enough room for a more comfortable life than more old-fashioned cages have traditionally allowed. Although the cockatoo was an interesting beast, I was much more enamoured with the red pandas that we saw next.

Given a fairly largish section of hillside to freely roam about in, three red pandas were sprawled in trees, ambling along branches and occasionally trotting across the ground as the whim took them. The space was certainly large enough to allow them a comfortable and quasi-free existence, but not so large that the zoo visitor can't see them. A fact helped by a slightly elevated wooden viewing platform that let you get close enough to the pandas for a detailed look, but without ever seeming to bother the pandas. One was directly below us a number of times and didn't seem to be the least bothered by our proximity. Certainly I've never seen them either so close up, or so mobile. Their rich red fur shines in the sunlight and their facial markings help to reinforce an impression of amicable curiousity. For all I know they may have tempers like a Tasmanian Devil with a hangover, but I left with a general urge to give one a cuddle and feed it whatever delicacy they may hold dear. It's a bad habit to "cutsify" nature, but when a creature looks like a soft toy to start with, I can readily understand it's proliferation.

Not nearly so cute, but theoretically easier to identify with, is the chimpanzee. I've heard on numerous occasions we're 98.5% genetically identical to them, a fact that gets trotted out a lot to reinforce how bad it is that they get treated like crap in the wild, and was included in the talk we heard about them here. The things that 99.999% genetically identical human beings will do to their own species when they don't happen to agree with how they look, where they live or what transcendental voice in the sky they happen to listen to would seem to nullify any logical extrapolation of compassion by genetic similarity though, but maybe that's just me being logical about it. It's true that chimps get a rough deal, but so do a lot of other species. Fighting for better treatment by anthropomorphising them would seem to be missing the point that we should be treating all fellow creatures better, regardless of how closely they resemble Uncle Ted after 3 pints of Scrumpy.

Skipping lightly past the African Wild Dogs who, despite not being much larger than the average golden retriever, exuded an air of twitch-eyed menace, and my partially successful attempt to photograph a distant tiger using Jo's telescope as an impromptu lens, I'll move on to the giraffe enclosure, which was the highlight of the visit in my book. Giraffes aren't an animal that I've ever had much affinity for previously, possibly as every other time I've seen them I've been on knee-cap level with them which isn't the best way to gain empathy for a creature. The Wellington Zoo's giraffe enclosure though was sensibly built around the side of a small hill, with a wooden viewing platform built out allowing humans an eyeball-to-eyeball experience with these majestic giants. Mind you, perhaps majestic isn't the word. Once you get close to a giraffe's head, see it eat, see it move, you start to realise that a giraffe is just a cow with vertical gain problems. They have the same amiable thoughtless expression when eating, the same way of stretching with their tail curled sideways, and the same idiotic habit of smelling each others pee. Lovely.

Anyway, we were lucky enough to be there when the keeper gave a little talk about them and allowed people to feed them small leafy branches, a task I decided to defer to the younger and more excitable members of the audience. Besides, I was trying to get a comedy nose-cam shot of the adult male, and it was tricky enough without playing tug-of-war with him over a branch as well. I succeeded, more by luck than judgement, and the result should be visible on this page somewhere.

Eventually all the branches were gone though, and as the giraffes wandered off, so did we. An obligingly photographic pelican showed off his algae scooping abilities, as well as his capacity to pose on a rock, but he failed to make the impact that the giraffes had.

Things looked up again shortly though, with the reptile nursery. On our way I'd passed some impressive 6" lizards that seemed to have an attitude problem. Initially glaring imperiously at me from a branch where I managed to get a photograph, the lizard obviously took against any potential paparazzi and started clawing at the glass in a futile attempt to get at me, so I probably just annoyed it some more by trying to take further pictures of it using the macro setting of the camera, which was also futile. My Canon IXUS 500, otherwise excellent and well-behaved in virtually all circumstances decided that the wood chips in the background were much more interesting than the aggravated lizard in the foreground, and no amount of requesting the autofocus to get it's act together would persuade it otherwise. By this stage, realising that disemboweling me was not going to be possible, the lizard had given up and was sulking just below the window frame out of sight anyway.

In the reptile nursery a more chilled and less perturbable baby chameleon was perfectly happy to be photographed, although from the wobbly and overly deliberate leg movements and his head swinging slowly about like a nodding dog on a gentle corner, I think he might have been stoned. Maybe that explained his dayglow green colouration despite sitting on a brown twig in a brown box. Exhibiting all the camouflage prowess of a drag-act in a spotlight, he seemed perfectly content to slowly and patiently work his way up the twig until he reached the glass and the roof and was forced to stop.

Moving past an otter with eyesight problems who seemed to be stuck in a perpetual loop in his little pond, we finally found the nocturnal house, which Jo had been enthusiastic about finding. To be honest I was too as it's probably the only way I'll ever get to see a Kiwi or a Tuatara, given I'm staggeringly unlikely to see them in the wild. As it turned out, I wouldn't see them here either. Because the inside the nocturnal house is pitch black.

Whilst I appreciate these animals are most comfortable in the dark and some sort of recreation of twilight (i.e. low light) conditions would be a good idea, it's just pitch friggin' dark in there. We'd been told by the helpful girl when we'd entered the zoo that we would need to give our eyes time to adjust to the dark, but there just wasn't a way mine were going to adjust that much. I put on my glasses, as my night vision in terms of clarity isn't the best, but it didn't help. I blundered carefully through what little of the jungle-lite environment I could make out by the tiny amount of light given out by a handful of small blue lights, but if there were any creatures in there, I couldn't find them. Mind you, it was so dark in there I could have stood on one of them and probably not noticed.

At this point you may think that I'm exaggerating. I'm really not. In fact, to test just how dark it was, I set my camera to a 15 second exposure and left it sitting on a post pointing towards what I could only assume was undergrowth. That's the longest exposure time my camera does, and is usually sufficient to take pictures of stars on a moonless night. It's pretty good.

The picture was uniformly black. A few hours later when I got home I cranked up the brightness and contrast in Photoshop and revealed... some slight speckling. Perhaps the zookeepers forgot to give us night vision googles when we entered, but I'm convinced that's the only way you'd actually locate anything in there. Well, short of some kind of thermal Predator-esque vision. I did manage to take one totally misrepresentative photo of the nocturnal house, which I've displayed here. Again I'll remind you this photo was taken with a 15 second exposure.

And that was it. On the way out we grabbed some drinks from the cafe, which for some reason has the Meerkats display on one side of it. Perhaps they realised that Meerkats are always a big draw and were using them as bait to lure people in to sell them tea and buns at the same time. The people, not the Meerkats.

Overall, I'd say that Wellington Zoo is well worth a visit. It's not as large as Taronga Zoo in Sydney, but it's well maintained and staffed by people who obviously care about the place a good deal. There isn't a vast number of animals, but those they have are given plenty of space in more natural habitats than a cage, and regular talks and feedings help to provide some extra information and entertainment for the visitor. If you're in Wellington with time to kill, have a look. Just watch your ankles walking through the nocturnal house.