Director´s view

I envied my Mongolian colleagues their traditional clothes: long, fur-lined daal and massive leather boots. We arrived to the very east of Mongolia, to Khalkhgol, in the “fourth nine” of the winter, that is in the harshest frosts. Night temperatures dropped to -40 °C and after the sunrise they slowly raised to -30, in the...

On Thursday morning I could see for the first time the newly born pangolin baby on the footage of the night camera. But I could hardly recognize only a part of the head and at a one point also the long curved claws of the left front leg. Fortunately, one hour later I could see it for a second with my own eyes. It was an amazing...

After two “COVID” years Prague Zoo returned to normal in 2022. Despite the lower number of foreign visitors and the deteriorating economic situation a high number of visitors returned: in 2022 a total of 1,419,122 visitors passed through its gates. In a way it was a breakthrough year in both a positive sense (the Dja Reserve...

I have recently posted a photo of a binturong on social networks. If you don’t know what it is and where it came from, you are not the only one. “My daughter wrote an essay on it in 4th grade, and the teacher scolded her that she made up the animal,” Mrs H. K. commented on the photo. And yet we have binturongs also in...

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.