Zoo’s birthday attracts the masses
Murray Powell considers the hundreds of zoo-goers around him and wonders how he ever managed the masses with a wooden till.
Fifty years on, the Hamilton Zoo is a sophisticated place, he says.
Hand painting, talks, a sweet station and animal encounters attracted the masses for the zoo’s 50th birthday celebrations. By 10am, there was a long queue snaking onto the road from the entrance.
Inside the zoo, paint-smeared children marvel at lemurs and parrots, their pram-bearing parents in tow.
It was always the children’s smiles that made it worth it for Powell and his late wife Gloria, those 50 years ago when they founded the zoo.
‘‘We loved to have the kids coming in the school buses,’’ Powell said.
‘‘It’s great to see the children out, the families out in the air, in the sun,’’ Powell said. ‘‘To be here is just amazing.’’
Yesterday, a smiley retiree beckoned people to see the marmosets – the smallest monkey in the world – and the brightly coloured macaw parrots.
Volunteer Neal Utting has been working at the zoo since 2001, around the same time it started getting rhinos. It’s not a pastime that gets old, though.
‘‘It’s something I love pointing out to people, because they just walk past them.
‘‘I’m grabbing them and saying look at the little monkey.’’
While Powell has a soft spot for the parrots at the zoo – two of which remember him – he doesn’t have a favourite.
‘‘They’re all favourites, they all have to have care ... You’re responsible for them because you’ve put them in a cage. It doesn’t matter what they are or where they are.’’
Today the zoo is home to more than 600 native and exotic animals. It welcomed just under 140,000 visitors in 2018.