urbpan | More Durrell

One of the exhibits I was really taken with was the Bat Tunnel. It's a plastic sheet greenhouse housing Livingstone's and Rodrigues fruit bats. These are two of the most endangered bat species.

There are tropical plants for visual interest, and ropes for perching. The entire enclosure is meshed with soft netting. A sliding door is closed at night, and in cold weather. The building is heated when necessary, and a bubblewrap flap insulates the doorway.

At the public viewing side there are binoculars tethered by a cable, so visitors can see the bats close up.

Fruit bats are messy eaters, chewing the juice out of a piece of fruit and letting the pellet of pulp drop out of their mouths. This exhibit has trays to catch the pulp, to reduce the amount of food attraction to pests.

Scrap sheets of hard plastic and a gravel trench help exclude rats. I checked behind the sheeting to see if there was any rat sign. What did I find?

Petit crapaud! Several, in fact.

The black-and-white ruffed lemurs were the loudest animals in the zoo. We could hear their growling and hooting from the dorm. They sounded somewhere between fighting raccoons and excited chimps.

This method of feeding the flamingos and geese removes the necessity of providing and washing a number of pans and dishes--also attracts fewer rats than a pan of food would.

Unfortunately, it does not deter the gulls from stealing food. The keeper was occupied for a while, trying to scare the gull away without scaring the flamingos. A special permit would be needed to lethally control the gulls.