Tropical Bird Greenhouse, ZooParc de Beauval

The ZooParc de Beauval began in 1980, when Françoise Delord opened a bird park at the Beauval locality in the commune of Saint-Aignan. The first mammals arrived in 1989 and turned the bird park into a zoo; the tigers of 1991 lifted attendance from about 70,000 to 150,000 visits.

The first greenhouse, the tropical great-ape house, opened in 1992 according to the encyclopaedias and in 1993 according to the park's website, which gives that date for the Chimpanzee and Orangutan Greenhouse; a vivarium was installed inside it in 1993. The Tropical Bird Greenhouse followed in 1994: 2,000 m² of covered jungle, home at the time to about 300 exotic birds. The ZooParc now describes it as its oldest greenhouse; it is one of the park's two earliest.

In 1997 came the tropical gorilla greenhouse, which also housed manatees (1,900 m², 13 m high), then an Australian greenhouse in 2002. The bird house was completely renovated in 2013 for the park's reopening. On 8 February 2020 the Equatorial Dome, 38 m high and covering more than a hectare, completed the set. Françoise Delord died on 3 December 2021, aged 81; her son Rodolphe Delord runs the park, whose attendance grew from 149,000 visitors in 1991 and 280,000 in 1996 to 1.9 million in 2024.

The Tropical Bird Greenhouse is one of the ZooParc's four fully enclosed tropical greenhouses, each devoted to a continent or an animal family, to which the Equatorial Dome was later added. It covers 2,000 m² at the park entrance, where the visit begins, and the cadastre records it as a single-storey building. The park states that its greenhouses are kept between 25 and 30 °C all year round; it gives 20 °C for the Chimpanzee and Orangutan Greenhouse and 26 °C for the Dome.

The interior is laid out as a tropical jungle planted with trees and walked through by visitors: part of the birds fly free and feed at small feeders. The greenhouse was entirely renovated in 2013. It remains modest next to the park's more recent halls: the gorilla greenhouse of 1997 reaches 1,900 m² under 13 m of height, and the 2020 Equatorial Dome covers more than a hectare under 38 m.

The ZooParc counts about 450 birds in the greenhouse, some of them at liberty, a figure that Wikipedia raises to more than 1,500 without citing a source. The species shown include the Andean cock-of-the-rock, Pesquet's parrot, the crested partridge, the Victoria crowned pigeon, the Luzon bleeding-heart, the Nicobar pigeon, the red-billed leiothrix, lorikeets and turacos. The rhinoceros hornbill, with a wingspan close to 1.50 m, rarely flies and moves mostly by hopping from branch to branch, as it does in the canopy of South-East Asia.

Mammals share the house: a pair of Linnaeus's two-toed sloths, hard to spot in the trees, hairy armadillos and, further along, Java mouse-deer. Beauval Nature, the park's association, supports in Borneo, with the organisation HUTAN, the installation of artificial nests for hornbills, whose nesting hollows are vanishing as oil-palm plantations spread.

The greenhouse is the first stop on the route: it stands at the entrance to the ZooParc, ahead of the other territories of the 40-hectare park. Half an hour is enough to walk through it, longer if you want to find the sloths in the branches. Heated all year round, it makes a refuge on cold or rainy days.

The visit continues with the other greenhouses: the Chimpanzee and Orangutan Greenhouse (1993), the gorilla house, the Australian greenhouse at the top of the steps leading to the giant pandas, and the Equatorial Dome, entered through a cave and included in the standard ticket. The park also offers a "keeper for a day" experience from the age of 16.