Director´s view

During my brief visit to Indonesian Jakarta I held several meetings, experienced a 5.6 magnitude earthquake and also quickly walked through two animal markets: the smaller street market Jatinegara and the larger Pramuka with a “department store” with four floors full of shops with thousands of bird cages.

As we do every year before Christmas, we are looking for adoptive parents for our animal “orphans”. And this time, among the “orphans” there are also large freshwater fish, darting around one of the water tanks in the Indonesian Jungle, in the moat next to the exhibit of southern pig-tailed macaques.

I originally ordered this stamp to use it as an illustration in the book The Red-haired Librarian. But it only just arrived from England and the book has been on sale for several weeks.

On Monday in the early evening, I popped in to the Dja Reserve again. Three gorillas were sitting side by side under the window to the enclosure: Kisumu, the male that we had brought from Austria two months ago, Moja’s daughter Duni, who had arrived from Spain a week after Kisumu, and Shinda, one of the three females from our...

Last Friday afternoon, the CASA military plane that brought us the female gorilla Duni from Spain landed at Prague-Kbely airport. Another big step had been successfully completed – and we have to thank the Air Force of the Czech Army and the Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic for the invaluable help they gave us.

To kick off with, I would like to express my deepest thanks to my colleagues, especially Jarda Šimek, Pavel Brandl, Roman Vodička and Martin Vojáček, as well as the command of the Czech Air Force and the 24th Air Transportation Base at Prague-Kbely, the general staff of the Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic and Ivan...

There are precisely 25 days until the opening of the Dja Reserve – Prague Zoo’s new gorilla house. This will be the culmination of many years of hard work, which has taken a large part of our lives.

High up in Kosciuszko National Park, my Australian colleagues showed me the typical habitat of a very small, extremely interesting and endangered marsupial – the Mountain Pygmy-possum (Burramys parvus). It was a scree slope formed from huge boulders. The Burramys (as it is also known) spends most of its time under the surface...

David Hunter invited us to his home in Albury, in the foothills of the Australian Alps. I was particularly taken by the unusual decorations in his living room. Imagine pouring lead into water – then enlarging the resulting formations to half or three quarters of a metre.