On Saturday we went on a family outing to visit Parken Zoo in Eskilstuna, Sweden, and I must say that I was rather disappointed with the zoo. Sure, it’s a smaller zoo but still there were a lot of things they could have done much better.
To begin with they could have made it easier to actually see the animals, some of them were nowhere to be found and others could hide away entirely. The pygmy hippopotamus couldn’t be seen anywhere, the red pandas hid themselves entirely in the foilage of large trees and the mane wolf could totally obscure itself from view just to mention a few. When I visit a zoo it’s to actually see the animals.
The facilities left a lot to be desired as well. Many of the compounds where separated from us humans by acrylic glass and in some cases they actually had real glass, but none of them were non-reflective glass making it quite difficult to see (and photograph) what was behind. Not to mention how dirty the glass panes were, there were a lot of hand smears obscuring the view and it wasn’t just a couple of hours of smears but days worth of it.
One of the main reasons for me to visit and shoot was the great cats, but in all but one compound they were just laying flat down motionless. In other words, no tigers, lions or cheetahs were captured which rather annoys me. If they at least had somehow made it a little easier to overlook the compounds it wouldn’t have been so bad, maybe an elevated vantage so the view wasn’t obscured by the topography
I’m sorry to say, but I’m not so sure I’ll visit this zoo ever again.
