Connecting with our Visitors
Visitors
Wellington Zoo has held a special place in the hearts of Wellingtonians and out of town visitors for the last 100 years. This year over 178,000 visitors helped us to celebrate our centenary year and checked out the developments happening at the Zoo at the same time. Despite atrocious weather in October contributing to a significant decrease in visitor numbers for the first half of the year, we still had nearly five percent more visitors than last year.
Over 80,000 of our visitors are children and young people and around half of our visitors come from Wellington city. Ten percent of Zoo visitors in the last year were international tourists.
Please view our monthly admissions chart.
Close Encounters
As a small intimate Zoo, we offer fantastic opportunities for our visitors to get up close and personal to our animals. Whether it is through a paid Close Encounter, or when a visitor happens to chance upon our serval kittens being taken for a walk around the Zoo, giving our visitors the chance to see, feel and smell the animals they share the planet with is a powerful way of connecting our visitors with our wildlife.
Our Close Encounter programme is still proving extremely popular. Over 1,000 people have experienced a Close Encounter with the red pandas, giraffes, cheetahs or big cats at Wellington Zoo in the past year. 98 percent of those who have done an encounter rated both their experience and staff knowledge and friendliness as excellent.
During a regular day at the Zoo, Wellington Zoo’s roving guides take some of our advocacy animals out and about in the Zoo including Billy the blue tongued skink and Jake the sulphur crested cockatoo.
Starting in February 2007, Tahi, Wellington Zoo’s one legged kiwi, has been putting in daily appearances in the Twilight, Te Ao MÄhina, accompanied by one of the guides to answer questions about him and kiwi in general. Tahi is a great conservation advocate. He is living proof of the damage human kiwis can do to kiwi, our national bird. Tahi was caught in a hunting trap in the bush and despite best efforts; vets were unable to save his leg.
For the past five months Zoo visitors have also been able to get up close to New Zealand spiders, such as white tails, tunnel web and wolf spiders in the Spider Show. The spiders are in easy to see containers, and images of them are projected onto the big screen. The Spider Show gives people a great opportunity to learn more about spiders and their important role in the ecosystem.
This year, we completed reviews of our Close Encounter programme and animal talks. We are working on making the ‘take home’ conservation messages even more powerful.
Zoo Crew
October saw the launch of the Wellington Zoo Crew, Wellington Zoo’s new annual membership scheme. Zoo Crew membership allows members to visit the Zoo as much as they like for one year. Our Zoo Crew members are some of the Zoo’s staunchest supporters, with some of them visiting the Zoo every week to see what’s new. We already have 1,000 members.
Feedback
We want to know how we’re doing so we regularly check with both Zoo visitors and Wellington residents to see how they rate their Zoo. Just under half of all Wellington residents visited the Zoo in the past year and nine out of ten of these visitors rated their visit as good or very good (with very good being the highest rating). Feedback from our Zoo visitors tells the same story, with nine out of ten visitors rating their visit as good or very good.
We’ve also looked into the impact our animal talks have on our visitors and just over half of those who attended an animal talk, by our keepers or guides, reported their attitude towards conservation was strengthened as a result.
Special Events – The Zoo turns 100
Wellington Zoo celebrated its 100th birthday this year, with birthday celebrations running from 28 October – 4 March; it was one big birthday party. The first Zoo in New Zealand to turn 100, we decided to celebrate in style. Celebrations kicked off on 28 October with a launch party, where Zoo visitors could tour behind the scenes of the new chimp block, join us for birthday cake and sing Happy Birthday to the Zoo, or just wander around and enjoy the party atmosphere.
Visitors to the Zoo could take a self guided tour of the Zoo, join one of our guides to explore the Zoo’s secret places, learn about the history of the Zoo from photos and information points or listen to recorded oral histories in the Elephant House. Zoolittle’s gift shop stocked special limited edition centenary merchandise.
The Museum of Wellington City and Sea held an exhibition, Public Zoo, celebrating the first 100 years of the Zoo and Capital Theatre Productions produced a play called An Elephant Never Forgets that was performed at the Zoo throughout January and February.
Wellingtonians past and present were invited to share their favourite memories of Wellington Zoo and what it means to them. We were overwhelmed by the number and scope of entries. The winners of this competition, two 10 year old girls from Brooklyn, won the fantastic prize of a trip for four to Sydney, spending a night at Taronga Zoo, experiencing a Roar & Snore sleepover.
Celebrations for the centenary came to an end on Children’s Day which saw nearly 2,000 visitors enjoy African drummers, facepainters, roving actors, a bouncy castle and – of course, birthday cake.
Telling Stories
We know that our visitors learn about conservation by experiencing and doing – so we’ve been introducing new opportunities to explore and learn. For example, a new ‘research camp’ is located next to the African Savannah where visitors can climb into a Landrover and pretend they are biologists studying animals on the savannah.
We’re also growing our team’s skills in interpretation and informal learning. Zoo staff have attended international interpretation conferences and a two day workshop by renowned international interpretation and visitor experience expert, Dr. Sam Ham. The workshop focused on techniques to help engage the visitor so they leave the Zoo motivated to take conservation action, our ultimate goal.
An inventory of signs throughout the Zoo showed that some of the animal species signs came from three different decades, and were all made from different materials. To bring the Zoo up to date, uniform species signs, with corresponding easy to use way finding signs were rolled out throughout the Zoo. Nearly 100 of these modern and easy to read signs were designed and installed over a three month period to make Wellington Zoo look more like a 21st century Zoo. We’d like to tell many more of our Zoo stories and will be seeking support from the community to enable even more of this to happen.
Living Classroom
Wellington Zoo was a living classroom attended by over 14,000 students last year. They come to learn all about the animals in the Zoo and amongst other things their natural habitats, how to care for animals and what they can do to help endangered animals. The majority of these students were from primary and secondary schools who attended the Zoo through the Ministry of Education’s Learning Experiences Outside the Classroom (LEOTC) programme.
We offered an all-day teacher workshop on Animal Behaviour for secondary school teachers in September and have seen an increase in secondary school students learning through the real life examples at Wellington Zoo.
The 2007 school year has begun with the Learning Team developing four new lessons that showcase what we do at the Zoo: dinosaurs (using tuatara as a living example), animal training, selective breeding and tourism. For the tourism lesson, students use the Zoo as a case study and learn about all aspects of the Zoo's operations including marketing, retail, and visitor experience.
Holiday Programme
Wellington Zoo’s school holiday programme gives young people with a passion for wildlife a unique opportunity to see behind the scenes during the three term breaks. The most popular theme this year was Zoo keeper for a Day, where the children learned exactly what it is that zoo keepers do. Over 700 children attended the holiday programme this year.