Director´s view

The most easterly provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo are still dealing with the consequences of the influx of refugees from neighbouring Rwanda, during the 1994 genocide there, and the tragedies of the two subsequent Congolese wars. These have yet to die down fully and have led to the so-called ‘Kivu conflict’,...

On Saturday, January 22nd, an Egyptian vulture flew in to Prague Zoo. From Lebanon, by plane.

The scientific paper published last year by Timothy T. Taylor and Christina I. Barrón-Ortiz may not have a very catchy title – Rethinking the Evidence for Early Horse Domestication at Botai – however, it is very interesting. After reading it, I remembered one of my favourite kaleidoscopes. Simply turn it around and the...

At first it reminded me a bit of the tale The Fall of the Votický Family in Karel Čapek's Tales from Two Pockets. In it, Dr. Mejzlik, a police officer, is visited by Mr. Divíšek, an archivist, who asks him to help him with his work on the reign of King George of Poděbrady; specifically, the sinister goings on at Votica...

A family trip to Karlštejn reminded me of an old mystery, closely related to this castle. First, I had fun trying to solve it by myself, later also with my two colleagues from Prague Zoo – Dr Ivan Rehák and Dr Jaroslav Šimek.

The covid-19 pandemic also adversely affected Prague Zoo in 2021. For the first 101 days of the year the zoo was completely closed, in the following weeks and months it was forced to come to terms with various restrictions and for a long time it had no foreign tourists. Thanks to the large interest from Czech visitors during the...

As if I would have anticipated it. In spite of it being a holiday and that we had been closed for weeks due to COVID, I set off on the morning of November 17, 2020, to the zoo. As soon as I arrived, I received a message that Mawar, the female of Sumatran orangutan, had started to give birth. Before half past eleven the baby was...

Just as with many of our other plans, the covid-19 pandemic complicated and delayed the pangolins’ arrival to Prague Zoo. But now we know we’ll be able to welcome them at the end of March, when a pair of Chinese pangolins (Manis pentadactyla) will arrive from Taipei Zoo: a female, Run Hou Tang, and a male, Gun Bao.

I spent my very first weekend as Prague Zoo’s director in the office. During that weekend I also wrote down ten points where I tried to define what our future approach to nature conservation projects for endangered species would be. These were and still are one of my priorities. Based on this document, we then started to...