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Oliver Das Gupta
Vienna is a world metropolis, and quite a few of its residents consider even smaller cities to be provinces. In addition to all the tourists, some visitors involuntarily come to the Austrian capital. Customs, for example, regularly bring exotic critters to Schönbrunn Zoo. Once the officials took eggs of rare Amazon parrots from a smuggler from Jamaica – this is how Caribbean chicks hatched on the beautiful blue Danube. At the beginning of the year they reported a particularly unusual find: 74 chameleons were in a suitcase that was checked in in Tanzania and flown to Vienna via Ethiopia.
The little reptiles had been wrapped in socks and laundry bags, they had half died of thirst and were tormented by parasites. Almost all of them survived, fed by the zoo keepers with fruit flies, oven fish and crickets – the best Viennese chameleon cuisine, roughly comparable to a Fiaker goulash, followed by a Seidl beer and strudel with whipped cream. Specimens of ten different species were found in the luggage. Some only occur in a small piece of forest in the Usambara Mountains, as the Schönbrunn reptile curator Anton Weissenbacher relates.
The new Viennese seem to be doing great things: The endangered Nguru dwarf chameleons laid eggs from which young animals now hatched. And what happens to the growing offspring? They would be distributed to European zoos, says Weissenbacher, maybe also to Germany. Then it’s back out of the glamorous cosmopolitan city, sometimes the animals end up in the provinces. Viennese seahorses recently arrived in Munich.
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© SZ / may