Posts Tagged ‘zoo’

If you have watched Scooby-Doo, you will no doubt have seen one of them any episodes set in an abandoned theme park. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to be in such a place in real life, you might want to visit Flamingo Land in winter. Because we had the entire place to ourselves.

How did this happen?

As part of taking Elina away for her birthday, I booked tickets to the zoo. It sounded ideal: the theme park half of Flamingo Land shuts in the winter, so the tickets are cheaper and nobody who enjoys theme parks bothers attending. As people who just want to go to the zoo bit, this was perfect.

Then, the Beast from the East hit. The roads were near impassible and the temperature was below freezing.

We went anyway. But nobody else did.

Literally nobody. Except for the staff. We spoke to a lot of the zookeepers, who were happy to talk to us given there was nobody else there, all of whom informed us that we were the only customers in the park.

Animal encounter

We started by feeding the giraffes. I was worried that the giraffe would eat me but the zookeeper assured me that it hasn’t eaten anyone to date. That’s the way I would lull humans into a false sense of security if I were a giraffe, though.

They have very long and dexterous tongues that they use to take the food out of your hands.

Lots of animals

Despite the cold weather, we got to see lots of animals. The rhino sheds were open, the birds and the Wallabies were out, even the camels and lemurs came out briefly for a look around. Despite the penguins being from South America, and therefore not used to the snow, they came out for a quick swim, too.

We caught a couple of feeding times including the tigers, who seemed to enjoy the snow, and the red pandas, who seemed unphased by it, too.

Anglesey Sea Zoo (not to be confused with Anglesey Sea Life Centre) is located on the south-west coast of the island. It has a lot of fun looking creatures, including some of the the cutest cuttle fish you are ever likely to see. It is not a huge place, but it is an interesting place. For around £7 each, that makes for good value.

We dropped by Helsinki Zoo while in Finland. They had elk! We also managed to catch the bear feeding.

Earlier this month myself and Elina went to Flamingo Land. I was quite impressed. We did not go on any of the rides; we just did the zoo. Even with that, it was still a full day of stuff to do, indeed we probably could have spent more time there if we wanted to see all the shows.

Photos from our trip to the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Centre on Jersey.

Here are some videos from our trip to Yorkshire Wildlife Park.

Lemurs. The lemur doesn’t do anything except lick itself, but another one does climb onto the house.

A tiger. You can see it breathing.

A wallaby. Some children try to pet it before it runs away.

Earlier this month, we headed to Yorkshire Wildlife Park. It’s fairly small, no where near the size of Chester Zoo or even Helsinki Zoo, but it does have “contact areas” in which you can go in and pet the animals.

A wallaby comes jumping across the path.

A capybara hides under a bridge after it was chased into the water by a rhea.

A lemur diving through the air.

A lemur jumping off the top of its house.

Elina holding hands with a wallaby.

Owls are such posers.

This photo was really dark, but trusting my histogram, when I brought it into Photoshop the detail came out far better than I was expecting.

An otter staring at his own reflection.

This lion was sleeping right next to the fence, then woke up and stuck his head up just long enough for me to take a photo.

This was through glass, but luckily it didn’t get in the way of his eyes.

This was just a gull, but I took this photo after it had just snatched some food and flown off with it.

Helsinki Zoo has some wonderful bears.

While in Torquay, we visited their costal zoo, Living Coasts. I had read some dubious reviews of it online, and some of the points were valid – they did have quite a few exhibits closed, above and beyond the otters that we knew would be missing when we entered. Kids might get a little bored too. But given the range of wildlife we got to see and the range of talks and feedings put on, I thought it was well worth the £11 we paid to get in and the pricing structure seems in proportion to what you would pay at Chester Zoo.