A Look Through the Natural History Museum Zoo of Paris, France

Today I blog from my hotel room in Paris, France. My sister and I visited the Museum National D'Histoire Naturelle's zoo, which left us pleasantly surprised for the most part. Despite being a gray day, raining on and off occasionally, we were impressed by all the animal enclosures as we saw them. Clearly there was a good eye for habitat design, and pretty much all of the enclosures were ideally built to suit the animal and not the guest visiting the zoo.

I would post photos of all the beautiful animals we saw but I'll limit it to just reptiles and amphibians. These were divided into two buildings, Vivariums and Reptiles. The first, vivariums, featured more humid enclosures that featured a lot of moss or other plant-matter. I thought most of them were very beautiful designed, despite the fact that they seemed to use fairly inexpensive materials like moss, logs, ficus, and pothos.

At this cage, we were not happy with the sheer number of crickets in the cage with these lizards. There must have been hundreds of black crickets climbing over everything, and this is excessive. I'm not sure why there was such an over-abundance of food but I hope they aren't nipping at the lizards. 

I was also troubled by how thin the gaboon viper looked, as snakes should be more or less rounded, and not sagging like this one is. I don't know if perhaps this snake has chosen not to eat for whatever reason or if no one is feeding him enough but I hope they correct it quickly. 

The chameleon was also a sore sight for us, who looked thin and dehydrated besides having misted plants. However, at least his cage was properly set-up and he seemed to have access to food and water. Perhaps parasites or some underlying illness are the cause. Had I seen an employee I would have talked to them about it but no such luck. 

Besides these three cases, we were pretty happy with everyone else. 

I took photos of several enclosures, as I liked how they looked despite using very easily available and affordable materials. I'm always looking for ideas to redesign my African fat-tailed gecko enclosure, and I definitely left with a few from here. 

Afterwards, we saw the Reptile building where we were extremely pleased with everything we saw. I would have died for some of their enormous arboreal set-ups for my Meller's chameleons!