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The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 7, 2008

Knut's private digs are in the southwest corner of the Tiergarten, a densely-wooded park that is Berlin's downtown oasis much as Central Park is to Manhattan in New York City. The entire zoo, a maze of footpaths among 1,400 species of 20,000 fenced-in animals, covers some 80 acres. Only the 500 species of birds and snakes are caged.

Some 15,000 animals and birds inhabited the Berlin Zoo by the time of the start of World War II. All but 91 were killed as allied bombers leveled 80 percent of the city of four million. In the years immediately after the War, cold Berliners cut down all 700 acres of the Tiergarten's and Zoo's trees to use as firewood for home heating.

Post-war Berliners were starving, too. Once the park had been stripped of its trees and surviving animals eaten, the Tiergarten was replanted as a 700-acre potato field until the Berlin Airlift ended in 1949. The Tiergarten and Zoo have since been totally replanted. No tree in Berlin is more than 65 years old.

The trees today shelter both the Zoo and, among other things,a half-mile-long weekend flea market. Presidential candidate Barack Obama recently held a huge campaign rally (attracting 200,000 spectators) at a Franco-Prussian war memorial near the Zoo.

The Zoo is a jumble of not well-marked walkways. My wife and I wandered aimlessly around the Zoo, lost, for almost three hours after we'd checked out Knut. Exits signs are in German only, and rather infrequent. When we did stumble across one, the sign indicating "exit" ("ausgang")was accompanied by arrows pointing in two different directions.

If it hadn't been for a number of multi-lingual ice cream peddlers strategically located throughout the Zoo to point the way out (generally, but not always, accurately), we'd probably have been trapped in there for a week. Not a pleasant thought; the sour smell of sewer gas permeates the air in the Berlin Zoo.

What else can you expect when you've got 20,000 well-fed but flatulent animals in a zoo? I guess the zoo knows it has a problem; giant fans stir the zoo air at frequent intervals. Still, I haven't smelled anything like it since this little boy traipsed through Boston's Franklin Park Zoo ages ago.

Herbert writes regularly for Hernando Today. He lives in Spring Hill.

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