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Berlin Day 5 : The Zoo!
Simon and I love going to zoos together when we travel, you may think that every zoo is the same and it isn't worth going to especially when you travel, you would be wrong :) Zoos are lots of fun and every zoo has a different variety of animals, some of which are rare to have in zoos (Such as Giant Pandas). Its a great day out and even when it it is wet and cold like it was today.
Berlin zoo is amazing, it has over 14,000 animals (1500 different species) spread across 35 hectares. During the war the zoo was very unfortunately bombed and only 91 of 3175 animals survived. Today they have increased the numbers and species dramatically and all the animals look happy and the environments are large, leafy and have ornate shelter buildings.
One of the many highlights we found is the nocturnal house, whereas in most zoos this means just bats and maybe the odd mouse; here they had a wide variety of strange looking animals, including a scruffy rabbit with a long tail and Jaguarundi (which are very small cat like creatures, they had 2 and a small baby one). We spent quite some time watching as they bounced and chased each other around the enclosure.
Knut is the current superstar of the zoo, we couldn't go to Berlin zoo and not see Knut. He is a baby polar bear born in the zoo, but his parents rejected him and his brother (who unfortunately didn't make it). He was the size of a small Guinna pig when the zoo keepers fished him out of the enclosure with a long fishing net. As an adorable white fluffy thing Germans became understandably enthralled, the reaction however was a little odd. Many videos of Knut playing and rolling and eating along with photos, were set to custom music and posted on youtube. For Example ...
Knut now is not so small and white or so fluffy. In fact he resembles a fully grown Polar Bear, even though he is under a year old!
Berlin zoo, from the amount of baby animals alone, definitely appears to be a breeding zoo. The pandas recently gave birth too, though apparently the sheer traffic of visitors coming to see Knut meant that the baby panda didn't survive, which is really tragic.
Pandas are really very sweet, they seamed happy enough despite the loss of their child, pictured here munching on the nutrition-less bamboo:
One of the things Simon nd I enjoy about zoos, aside laughing at Bantams and other amusing creatures—is doing impressions of the animals. This is Simon being a panda:
You can get a combination ticket when you go into the zoo in order to also go into the aquarium. It is not the same big aquarium with the lift inside a fish tank as advertised on various pamphlets in our hotel—though we didnt know that at the time.
It was still fun, there were lots of lizards, walking fish, and a very good selection of jellyfish, including baby jellyfish that you could see under magnifying glass! This green snake apparently, has the very original name of 'Green snake':
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Berlin Tours
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