Wilhelma Zoo

We have done so much in so little time it seems, but I never sit down to write about it! So this is going to be a great undertaking. I will begin where I left off, with the Stuttgart Zoo – which is actually called the Wilhelma Zoo. We went there on 7/18/09. It’s a very interesting zoo because it has both animals and a huge botanical garden. It was kind of like walking through a park…with wild animals haha. The first things we saw were the penguins! The zoo was so different from our zoos back home (it was super clean for one…) because you can literally get right next to the penguins and other non-threatening animals. I could have kissed them I was so close!



Then we walked through a bird aviary, which was pretty cool because all these different mixes of birds were right around our heads chatting away. We saw cockatiels and budgies and even exotic birds. Some of them even walked on the ground and you could pet them. My favorite part of the bird aviary was, ironically, not a bird. It was a little family of wallabies! At first I was very disinterested in them because they were far away and not doing anything, but then a little baby wallaby fell out of his mommy’s pouch and was hopping around so he won me over. So sweet.



We went to the reptile exhibit next (it was so hot in the crocodile room), and my favorite was the big snake because it had obviously eaten recently. In the picture you can see the big lump in his tummy. Brian and I speculated what it might have been. My guess is naughty German children.



Next was the aquarium, where they had some of the strangest animals I have ever seen. There were fish with horns, turtles that had feet and heads shaped like rocks, and other weird things. One fish particularly interested me, because it kept its eyes above water.



The monkey exhibit was one of my favorites, because they had some really interesting tiny monkeys. They looked so inquisitive and stared at everyone and played with their monkey friends as well. I thought they were cute. There were smaller monkeys than in the picture below, but they moved so fast I never got a good picture of them. I also did not get a picture of the zookeeper playing with the 3 baby gorilla toddlers in the glass room, but Brian and I stayed there for quite awhile and watched them. They reminded me so much of human babies because they were playing inside a cardboard box. Just like human kids, they’d rather play with the box than the toy inside.



One of my absolute favorite things was the chickens! We got to watch baby chicks hatch out of their eggs. It was amazing. I mean, for a city girl it was anyway. Some chicks had just hatched when we arrived so it was adorable to watch them rest from their very stressful and draining journey.



There were of course the regular zoo animals, elephants, tigers and all that. For some reason most of the large cat animals were not out, but the tiger was awake and in his glass enclosure. You could touch the glass and get right next to him. I’m used to seeing them from a long distance, so I was amazed how big they are up close. The animals in the zoo seemed much more active than in our zoos, check out this elephant reaching for some plants!



The baby animals were of course my favorite. There was a baby giraffe, baby camels, and a baby rhino…well he was actually more like a kid rhino, but still. The giraffe was very sweet and got really upset when it realized its Mama had gone to the other side of the enclosure. Giraffes are such strange looking animals.



Brian’s absolute favorite part of the zoo was the polar bears for some reason. They were probably the least active animals we saw, since they were snoozing the whole time. Here’s big boy on his rock:



Overall it was very enjoyable. Zoos appear to be much cleaner and bigger than the ones back home. However, they are more confusing because they don’t give you maps and it was pretty hard to find where we were going sometimes. I’m glad we went though, it was a lot of fun.