Eliot's Travels

I love zoos! For some reason, this one really stands out as one of the best. The zoo is so old and historical. People enjoy the 19th-century atmosphere of the gardens: the winding paths, majestic trees, the fascinating sculptures and the monumental historical buildings. Throughout the zoo you see beautiful, old buildings that are used for maintenance, offices, monkey houses, and other animal exhbits. Even many of the cages are from the 1800s. This scene with Miles is typical: he's sitting on a bench across from the elephants with mature vegetation above and a historic building (housing the wild dogs) in the background. You might expect the animal spaces to be small, but they really have a nice areas. The vegetation is real - the red panda was sleeping in a real shrub with lots of shrubs and grass in his pen. Two Grevy's zebras come down to their pond to drink at the African Savannah exhibit. Pelicans and cranes were hanging out on the shore; white-tailed gnus and other zebras were up at the shelter eating. The habitats are really well done. The trees are old and provide plenty of shade and cover for the animals and the visitors.


The five elements that make up present day Artis are each represented in the logo: Artis as a Zoo and Aquarium, Botanical gardens, Zoological Museum, Geological Museum and Planetarium. Artis contains more than 200 different species of trees. Some of the trees predate Artis itself. One such example is the common oak next to the outdoor chimpanzee enclosure. This tree has been estimated to be about 250 years old.

Eliot and I ate lunch looking at the penguins while Miles slept. A sign by the pengiuns showed the 30+ different species of pengiuns and another gave the location of pengiun colonies around Antartica. We should have taken a picture of the sign - Eliot really liked it. The aquarium is shown in the background. Inside the aquarium, they have a display of the canal water system, large tanks with big fish (like Tropical Discovery at the Denver Zoo but bigger), salt water tanks with vast coral displays, and fresh water tanks too. The big fish dwarfed Eliot and the tank was angled up to the ceiling about 10 ft tall; he didn't like them being so close. It was pretty cool. We saw a giant Japanese salamander (the name does not lie), upside down white-and-blue jellyfish, and the largest catfish I have ever seen. At one end of the aquarium is the Zoological Museum. The exhibit hall had skeletons of a giraffe, an elephant, and this big whale among other animals. Eliot wasn't too sure about this part - the skeletons were pretty big. Miles slept through the whole thing and woke up as we left the aquarium building.

posted by Whitney @ 2:53 AM