My favourite zoo currently is the
Alice Springs Desert Park - most of the 10 other zoos I’ve visited as of now have much larger and more diverse collections, but, being devoted to the fauna of central Australia, the desert park’s nicheness just makes it stand out as one of the most unique and memorable zoos in the country for me. My chief reasons for ranking it so highly:
1) The interior deserts are one of my favourite environments both in Australia and in the entire world, so an entire zoo devoted to them is like heaven for me.
2) It houses a range of species which are either found in only one or two zoos outside the park (chuditch, numbat, golden bandicoot, thorny devil etc) or are exclusively kept there (rufous hare-wallaby, burrowing bettong, brush-tailed mulgara etc).
3) The nocturnal house there is my favourite part of any zoo I've ever been to. It looks incredible (can see some pics of it, as well as the rest of the park, from my 2021 trip
here) and is home to many of the park’s more exclusive species.
4) The whole setup of the zoo taking you through different desert environments is very cool.
Although I still haven’t visited many of the bigger zoos of the east coast yet (Taronga, Melbourne etc), I reckon the Alice Springs Desert Park will probably remain unchallenged as my favourite, at least in Australia, for all the reasons I stated previously. Except perhaps for the
Territory Wildlife Park, which is the desert park’s counterpart for the tropical Top End of the Northern Territory - the monsoonal north being my
other favourite part of Australia. It’s set up in quite a similar fashion to the desert park, also having a range of species rare or absent in other zoos (black & antilopine wallaroos, spectacled hare-wallaby, savanna glider, black-footed tree-rat etc). Unfortunately I haven't visited it yet - when I was last in the Top End in 2016 I only got to visit Crocodylus Park - so I can't properly judge how it ranks compared to the desert park, but I'm super keen to get back up into the Northern Territory again whenever possible and it'll definitely be high on my list of things to do!
Moral of the story - more small niche zoos focused on particular regions please! I just really like seeing the biodiversity of a particular area being showcased, especially when it involves species you wouldn't normally see in captivity otherwise.