First update from American soil! That is worthy of a Woho. WOHO! My trip went well, and I had no inconviences despite all the big obstacles to get past like transfer in NY and getting past boarder control. So today was my first day in St. Louis. St. Louis is the biggest city in Missouri and I must say for an American city it has many old buildings with elegant architecture with is very different from the other American cities that I've been to that have either been more modern, more simplistic or more like barracks. So today on my first day I made an excursion out to Forest park which is a really and I mean REALLY large city park. It's the biggest park in all of the U.S  It contains, a zoo, a golf course, I think 4 different museums, a ball park and plenty of green area space in between. So of course I took the chance to visit St. Louis Zoo which was super fun. You are always a bit skeptical when going into animal parks abroad since Sweden has such high standards for animal care but that sort of concerns was really wasted on this park, it kept top class. I spent a lot of time in the park just walking around, looking at the animals and examining the design of the enclosures and how the zoo chose to create the animal visitor interaction.

Kudu Enclosure.

The animal enclosures were in most cases nicely designed to be somewhat similar to the natural habitat of the different species of animals and offered different forms of stimulation for them. All in all, really nice enclosures.  Because the climate here is much more forgiving than at home, plants were used to a larger extent to enrich the enclosure, something that is harder to do at home when the climate is more harsh. I really liked how they had designed the enclosures for the great apes here. I have not seen the new gorilla enclosure at home in Kolmården but they have to make something really extra out of it to even come close to what they had here in my opinion.

Gorilla enclosure. Loved it.

The only thing I really reacted negatively to during my visit was the size of some of the big cat enclosures. Most of the animals had enclosures of reasonable size but some of the ones for big cats I found way too small, however, I did not see the indoor enclosures so hopefully they are larger and easily accessible for the cats.

My personal favorite of the day, the okapi.

The zoo was not only well designed for animal wellbeing but also for the visitor experience. You were able to really get up-close with the animals as a visitor since the zoo used see through glass for several of the enclosures extent.  At the same time the animals were in most cases, with the exception for some of the ungulate enclosures, able to retreat out of view from the visitors. Much effort had gone into designing away bare concrete walls in the enclosures to make them more esthetically pleasing to look more like cliff sides, which was probably more for the visitor experience rather than for the animals'.   

Funniest species name of the day: The Bongo 

What really struck a chord with me with this zoo was that it had free admittance, or rather free admittance together with putting forward information about wild life conservation .  Now you might just think that I'm cheap and on a student's budget but having free admittance to the zoo really opened up for new possibilities. St. Louis Zoo had really put a lot of thought in effort in reaching out with their conservation and research method to the public and with free admittance so many people were able to come there and take part of that message. I saw hundreds after hundreds of school kids coming there today and all sorts of other people coming there today and as you walked through the zoo you could hear them  reading out load and actively take part in the information available to them. To reach out and educate so many people, and especially kids can only be summed up with one word by me: Amazing. All in all, the St. Louis Zoo was a great experience.

There wasn't just a lot of mammals but also a reptiles and insects and each one of them had a house of their own that was filled to the brim with different species.

       
Largest snake I've ever seen, the green anaconda! Hand for size comparison.

I think Sandra, who also does her Master's, should come here and expand her dataset ;)

After my visit to the Zoo I went to St. Louis Art Museum which is one of the largest art museums in the U.S It had really nice collections of artifacts from different historical eras from all over the world that I found interesting as well as nice paintings.

The museum.

View from the museum.

Statue of St. Louis.