Wild Animals Living in the Zoo

In modern zoo design, there is a growing and admirable trend of considering not only the needs of the zoo’s exhibited animals but also those of wild animals that may choose to live within the zoo grounds.

Perhaps the most noticeable are our bird visitors. The most common are hooded crows, jackdaws, and magpies, but with a bit of luck, you might also spot blackbirds, green woodpeckers (yaffle), blue tits, great tits, greenfinches, black redstarts, chaffinches, robins, and countless other species, especially in the more densely vegetated areas of the Zoo. The Great Lake (Nagy-tó) is a world of its own in this respect. Many birds, including mallards, grey herons, and cormorants, freely come and go, even though generations have used this lake as their nesting site. Some bird guests, like tawny owls, are mostly active at night, so visitors rarely see them.

Small mammals, such as hedgehogs and bats that flit among the trees, also emerge under the cover of night in the park of the Zoo. We even found a dormouse that had made a nest in one of the crevices of the Big Rock (Nagyszikla). Lizards are more active during the day, and they can often be seen basking on rocks (sometimes even near much larger exotic reptiles) or darting across the paths. We most commonly observe wall lizards and sand lizards.

Arthropods (insects) also make their presence known. For example, mammoth wasps can be seen here during their swarming period, particularly near the alpaca enclosure, where the males excitedly circle the hatching site of the females. Since people often fear these large wasps (as the mammoth wasp is Europe’s largest wasp species), we temporarily cordon off the area near their activity. However, they are completely harmless, as long as no one tries to catch and trap them in their hand. Of course, there are many other free-roaming insects in the garden, from rhinoceros beetles to cone-headed grasshoppers.

Of course, there are also animals that voluntarily choose the Zoo as their home, whose presence brings not only joy but also challenges. For example, hooded crows often rummage through trash bins, and various ants can sometimes cause problems for residents of the Butterfly Garden (Lepkekert). However, if ants happen to wander into the giant anteater enclosure, they become an extra snack for the animals living there. Fortunately, there are solutions for everything: we use trash bins that crows can’t get into, and in the Butterfly Garden, we place the legs of the pupa cabinets in water to keep the ants away. The biggest nuisance in the Zoo comes from the red foxes that occasionally sneak in from the railway tracks. They would love to visit the flamingo enclosure, which is why we have implemented a special fox protection system at night in that area.