A large group of mammals left their familiar enclosures in our mammal department on Thursday March 26. For starters, de last fruit bats staying at AAP, seven females and two young males, were moved to the only zoo of Luxembourg, the Parc Merveilleux.
The Parc Merveilleux is a remarkable project, combining a fairy tale forest with a zoo and at the same time providing work to more than 100 employees that are mentally disabled. Our fruit bats will be housed inside a newly built cave that is part of the equally new 'Madagaskar' tropical greenhouse. At the same time, a group of 50 female fruit bats is due to arrive from a German zoo. However there need be no fear offspring might be produced – both of the AAP-males have been recently sterilized.
Notorious prairie dog
The male prairie dog Choco, infamous at AAP for trying to bury alive two male members of its own kind, will be given a chance to show he's better with females. The female Guinevere is waiting for him in the Alameda Wildlife Park on Gibraltar, and word is that she's very well up to male company in spite of her high age. The Alameda Wildlife Park came into being more or less by coincidence, when the local authorities started housing a number of confiscated animals in a botanic garden. It's a small but beautiful park with different height levels, stone steps, subtropical plants and views of the sea. Most of the animal enclosures are quite basic, but the park is working on a masterplan that should lead to a thorough face lift of the park by the year 2013, when the park celebrates its 10 years existence.
 Damage by non-endemic species
Finally, three raccoons named Shoshone, Tainn en Jona left for Rhodes in the French Alsace. Three female raccoons were already living at the Parc Animalier de Ste Croix, but had remained mostly invisible through the shrubs. Doubling the amount of animals should proof to the 180.000 yearly visitors that raccoons actually are living in the enclosure! The visitors can try to catch glimpses of the animals from a footbridge, but thanks to the presence of willows, marsh plants and water the raccoons have the necessary privacy. On the other side of the footbridge, a group of beaver rats is living. In this park, with education as one of its main purposes and, apart from the raccoons and the beaver rats, a collection of European species only, these two species show how damaging non-endemic species can be to the local environment.
Thanks to these outplacements AAP has space available again in the mammal department for animals coming from the quarantine. Saying goodbye and having a fresh start…
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