April 22 - Hagenbeck's Tierpark (Zoo)

Our first order of business was to return Heinke’s bicycle, so after breakfast and a quick shopping trip to Aldi we took the bike with us on the bus to Reinbek Bahnhof. Bicycles are allowed in most buses in Hamburg, but the space for them is limited and has to be shared with baby carriages, walkers, wheelchairs, and the like. The walkers I saw on the streets and busses in Germany were quite different from U.S. models; they had four pneumatic tires and grips with hand brakes similar to a bicycle. They looked very stable yet mobile, but they did take up about four square feet of space in a bus or train. On this trip I had to squeeze Heinke’s bicycle in back with a baby carriage and a walker while leaving space for people to exit thru the rear doors of the bus, and that was a difficult balancing act both metaphorically and literally. The bus driver was unfortunately very jerky and the bicycle tried to roll back or forward with each sudden acceleration and deceleration, and there were a lot of those on the short drive to the station!

We arrived at the station without the bicycle having careened into anyone, for which I was thankful, and there I had to carry it down a flight of stairs, thru the pedestrian tunnel, and back up the stairs to the platform, for which I was less thankful. We shuttled around the S-Bahn and U-Bahn system for the next hour and finally reached a station straight down a main street from Heinke, but it was level so Monika rode slowly while I walked along until we reached their place. There we dropped off the bike plus helmet and emergency repair kit, which were our additions, and chatted with them about the pros and cons of condominium ownership before heading back to the train station. Gustl, as I might have expected, had a spreadsheet where he had detailed each category of expenses on each of his condominiums, so as usual he could provide us with authoritative answers to our questions.

We didn’t go directly back to Reinbek, however, because we really wanted to see Hagenbeck’s Tierpark (Hagenbeck Zoo), which I had visited many years ago when our sons were children. I was already surprised at the entrance, which had a towering oriental temple type of structure off to one side that I certainly didn’t remember seeing previously. It turned out to be a Nepalese Hindu temple and was a quite recent addition, dating back only to 1999. The temple was dedicated to Vishnu, the destroyer and creator, and was just covered with detailed, colorful woodcarvings on it, all of which were exquisitely done and some of which were, shall we say, quite uninhibited. The temple was complemented by an ornately gilded garden house from Thailand situated on a little lagoon inside the park. The lagoon had normal waterfowl like ducks but also exotic waterfowl like different species of flamingoes.

The main reason to go to a zoo, of course, is to see the animals rather than the buildings, and Hagenbeck’s Tierpark had a full complement of them. Carl Hagenbeck, the founder of the zoo, pioneered the use of naturalistic environment enclosures back in the 1890s and his son and grandson continued the tradition. One story about Carl Hagenbeck started with the fact that he really liked the lions and could actually pet them and play with them. One day in a cage holding both lions and tigers he stumbled and fell flat. The tigers immediately started to pounce on him but the lion chased them off and saved his life. A statue of Hagenbeck and the lion located near the old entrance, which was still there but not used, memorialized that event.

The exhibits at Hagenbeck are all numbered and we traversed them in order from 1 to 72, crisscrossing the park several times in the process. Along the way we learned that the zoo was heavily into research, and apparently part of that research was aimed at helping breed the endangered species like orangutans. One of their orangutans named “Bella” had been there 40 years and was called a “super mom” partly because she had born four children and adopted two more when their mother didn’t want to raise them. Now that got my attention, because I know that some species like Zebras definitely do not foster youngsters and in general across species I think fostering is a pretty rare phenomenon. Raising children for any of the Great Apes including humans is a lengthy process and prone to problems with bad mothering, so this social welfare mechanism of fostering children would seem to be very valuable for the survival of the species, as Darwin might put it. Monika also remarked on how different all the faces of the orangutans looked; we could recognize some of them from their mug shots posted outside the cage. The faces of the other ape species seemed much less distinct, at least to me.

The smaller species of monkeys were in other enclosures, of course. It was particularly fun to watch the youngsters play and chase each other all over the place. It really did remind me of the play antics of human children. The elephant herd also had an infant, which was just as cute as a lumpy, hairy, gray thing with a trunk could possibly be. One of the elephants also seemed to be socializing with the keeper who was in the enclosure keeping watch over them. It is extremely hard to interpret cross-species actions, I know, but the way the elephant stood next to him with its mouth wide open and curled his trunk tenderly around the guy’s head surely looked like an elephant version of a greeting, hug or caress of some kind.

We detoured over to the penguins, seals, and sea lion cages to watch the feeding time. The penguins were funny just by the way they waddled around on land. In contrast, they were really graceful swimmers and generally seemed to be swimming in formation, reminding me of a synchronized swimming demonstration. The seals and sea lions were funny in part because of the tricks they had been taught to do for their fish. It was hokey slapstick humor, or course, but funny nonetheless.

It took us about three hours to wander all over the zoo and take pictures of all the animals – lions and tigers and bears – oh my. The animals could hide but they couldn’t run, at least too far, so we managed to get some decent shots with the 10x zoom on Monika’s camera.

Actually, many of the animals were quite nice about giving us good poses for the pictures, and I thought it was a shame we couldn’t give them some kind of reward. Feeding the animals was not, of course, permitted, so I had to limit myself to a verbal “thank you”, which probably was not appreciated all that much, especially as it was English rather than German! Only the baby giraffe tried to stay in the background and the owl did not really chew her cage to get Only the baby giraffe tried to stay in the background and the owl did not really chew her cage to give use a better look. a better look.

By the time we left my feet were getting just a little sore so I was glad to just sit on the trains for the ride back to Reinbek. It was at the end of the evening commuting time and we caught a 236 bus back up the hill, saving my feet that trip also. Since we were trying to empty out the refrigerator before we left the next Monday, Monika warmed up assorted leftovers and we had a quick supper before watching reruns of “Berlin, Berlin” on TV. After the evening news, we found a musical special called the “Lustige Musikanten” (Happy Musicians), so we watched that for the rest of the evening while I worked on the journal and Monika worked on the pictures from the Tierpark.