News

Prague Zoo has started giving financial support to the Pesisir Balikpapan Project, which has been running in the Balikpapan Bay on the island of Borneo under Czech leadership since 2007. Its aim is to protect this highly valuable natural area, which is home to, among other things, a population of about 2,000 Proboscis Monkeys,...

It’s quite incredible. In a rather dingy department store you take the lift to the top floor and it opens onto one of the most appalling menageries in the world. It is located in Bangkok, Thailand, on the top floor of the Pata Department Store. I first visited this menagerie more than three years ago and at the time I wrote:

The Conference on the Illegal Wildlife Trade, held last week in London, was hardly mentioned by the Czech media. It was as though the protection of elephants, rhinoceroses, pangolins and other species threatened by poaching and illegal trade were not our concern. Of course it is, which some of Czech zoos as well as other...

He has gone down in history as one of the symbols of the catastrophic flood of 2002. When the water flooded the pachyderms’ house, virtually no one expected that Slávek the hippo, who was trapped on the ground floor, would survive. Eventually, however, to everyone’s surprise, the volunteers found him alive and well on the...

The skylark I saw this spring and summer, singing loudly as it flittered above the fields, will be heading for France, or across France to the Iberian Peninsula. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for it.

The visitors who will come to Elephant Valley in the evenings these days will observe an amazing view – an elephant herd at sunset. The zookeepers have decided to try a new idea and the elephants are let to the outdoor paddock at night. The change of the established regime was accepted by the elephants very positively and...

Last week another two Egyptian Vultures were taken from Prague Zoo to the Bulgarian mountains. Both of this year’s young, one of which hatched at Zlín Zoo, will spend about three weeks in an artificial nest and then be released to bolster the numbers of this endangered species in the wild.

I am not surprised, for that matter I have written many times about this issue, but it has not diminished my disbelief and, above all, disgust.

The Mongolian rangers Altanashagai and Biligsaichan are on a week-long trip to the Great Gobi A Strictly Protected Area on brand new motorbikes. The bikes are laden with fuel, water and materials for the patrol of this desolate area the size of Switzerland. Here they face an extremely strenuous ride taking them on stony and...