Director´s view

Altogether 1,043 young of reptiles, birds and mammals have been born or hatched during 2024. It is not so much about their total number, but rather the exceptionality of many of them. Only a few zoological gardens can boast of three ape babies in one year, and no other zoo in Europe has raised a second pangolin baby. However,...

The area of the Strictly Protected Area Great Gobi A in southwestern Mongolia is comparable with Switzerland. It is a deserted, remote part of the world, but for years we have been participating here in protection of the wild camel. An uninformed layman would probably not be able to tell it apart from the domestic Bactrian...

Five-month-old pangolin female Connie hasn’t even noticed the special diluted mixture. She even walked through it in the plastic feeding box and smeared it on the bottom. She thus clearly illustrated the big problem that we had been struggling with for weeks: we could not graduate her from the mother’s milk to the food of...

Lions as well as other large carnivores occasionally also hunt porcupines, probably mostly when they don’t have enough of their usual food, or when young males in particular test their limits (which is, all in all, a feature of all young males of a lot of animal species including humans).

Porcupine’s spines are an item in demand, weather as a souvenir, or a material for fishing floats. However, when I visited the Archives of the City of Prague, I discovered to my surprise that the restorers also use them when cleaning the bindings of old books. Lo and behold! I immediately offered that our zoo would become...

Today the female gorilla Gaia is exactly six months old. To have current pictures of her for this opportunity, I went to take her photos ahead of time.

This time I missed Humboldt penguins in their most noticeable courtship, part of which is a loud honking. I have, however, taken a lot of photos of the individual pairs collecting material for nest linings and showing affection to each other. The head keeper Kuba Mezei then identified them to me, so it came out that I also took...

It is known all over the world that since July 1 we have the second baby of Chinese pangolin in Prague Zoo; its photos have been published in media from the United States to India to Japan. But this is how it started – and I happened to be around.

We walked through the large acclimatization enclosure in Kazakhstan’s Golden Steppe and looked around in vain for the three Przewalski’s horses that we released here. Finally, we noticed a movement in the distance. But it was only a solitary saiga.