Director´s view

It was constantly below zero in Astana last week. However, it didn’t matter too much because we spent almost all our four-day-long stay there in meetings and negotiations.

I met the Zoos Victoria Director Dr Jenny Gray after almost two years. In the administration building of Melbourne Zoo we talked about what had happened during that time. “And most importantly, after ten years of fruitless searching we found Victorian dragon. It went unobserved for fifty-four years and many considered it...

Today, on Saturday, February 10, we published the name of the gorilla female, born in Prague Zoo at the very beginning of this year. Sure, I will write it at the end of this text, but first about selecting the name. In fact, this time we proceeded in a completely unconventional way. We asked the children from Cameroonian town...

I started calling her Pýchavka (Puffball). Pýchavka with y, although for a spiny animal, Píchavka would be more suggestive. (Píchavka is derived from the verb píchat, which means to prickle in English). But in the first video taken by the camera her spines were hardly noticeable, and she really reminded me more of a...

Two big news items of the past year appear for the first time only in this summary: as the only one breeding facility outside of Brazil we obtained the rarest duck of the world – Brazilian merganser – and we succeeded to breed short-beaked echidna. However, the year 2023 was above all the year of the first pangolin bred in...

You wanted them, so you will have them. Capybaras are coming back to Prague Zoo. Probably the most popular animals in the world at the moment. At least in the world of social networks, where they appear in countless memes with huge numbers of shares.

In mid-August I wrote here about a young mountain bongo female from our zoo, who lost her mother but showed a tremendous will to live. Thanks to her connection with the herd, she began to drink from two other females, who were caring for their own young, which, together with artificial supplemental feeding was sufficient for her...

When I wrote last week about the aardvark female Pieta, who became the oldest representative of her species in the world, also the oldest historically, I should not forget some other representatives of the oldest animals also living in our zoo.

I preferred not to talk too much about it, not to jinx it and waited patiently until Saturday. Then I went to congratulate Pieta with a handful of mealworms.