Today I'd like to show you the rest of the animals we saw in the zoo early last month. Some of them have already been posted, so if you're interested, please check it out here, here and here.
Let's start with the star of every zoo, the big brown bear. This bear is living freely in some part of the country and it is becoming a bigger problem year by year.
The wild bear population of Romania is a few times higher than the territory that they have at their disposal. Which mans they are roaming around everywhere, approaching populated areas, big cities in pursuit of food. I used to get warning alerts quite frequently, till the bear that was roaming around the outskirts of the city has been captured and relocated.
Bears are protected animals, no one can harm or capture them and slowly they have more protection that humans or livestock.
The zoo can only host a few of them, here for example are five or six, as there's no space for more. These old guys are here all day, bathing and having fun with the toys they have.
Sometimes visitors throw food into the cage, which is strictly forbidden. At the time of our visit, someone threw a croissant to the bear on the first photo, not thinking that these animals are not used to processed food.
The best part of our visit was that we could pet this fallow deer's antlers. Usually they don't come close to the fence and even if they do, they don't like to be touched. This one was an exception though and I could not be more grateful. He was sitting next to the fence and couldn't care less about visitors constantly touching his antlers and petting him.
Our visit was in August and this deer was about halfway after shedding his antlers. This is a process that happens every year. As you can see, the antlers were still covered by hair although I'm not sure this is the appropriate term for it.
Mouflons were not interested in visitors at all. This one was sitting in the shade, enjoying his day, the rest was far from the fence, in the shade somewhere.
Goats did the same, far from the visitors.
There are two elephants in the zoo, one of which is sick. She's doing the same move over and over again, all day. After seeing her last year, I've heard a specialist speaking on TV about another elephant rescued from captivity that had the same problem. The specialist said it is because of the stress caused by being locked up. This elephant must have been through something similar. One thing I can't stand and that's animal cruelty.
There's an artificial lake for swans and storks and other birds flying free in the zoo area.
There was this black swan having fun in the water. Black swans are not very common, so I was happy to see one.
The others were resting in a different part of the lake.
This is a space specially set up for the birds. In the background, the pink house is the winter house for swans. Storks leave in September, or even earlier, at the end of August and come back in February.