Posts Tagged ‘animals’

Lovely zoo. The habits looked large and well-designed but we still got to see plenty. We got lucky with the elephants and the tiger was huge. The hippo was hiding, unfortunately. They also have rhinos, giraffes, zebras, chimps, sea lions and loads more. But the highlight might have been the wolves. There was a pack of them running around. The gorillas were also brilliant.

Wild Encounters is located just outside Newcastle West. They have a range of birds, reptiles, meerkats and farm animals. Also, a tanuki, which was both cool and very timely given how popular Animal Crossing currently is in our house. There was plenty to keep us entetained in terms of talks, a hands-on petting of the rabbits and guinea pigs, and ferret racing in which Venla and her team mate Polly took first place!

DUNeS recently hosted a visit from Dogs for the Disabled who are a charity that provide assistance dogs. They are similar to Guide Dogs but help with physical mobility issues like walking, retrieving dropped items, raising the alarm if something is wrong and a range of other tasks.

They also provide therapy dogs which in this case is a well trained dog that acts as a companion (the dog has no additional training in psychodynamic theory).

They are a registered charity and currently fundraising to build a new HQ so if that is a cause you would like to support, check out the Dogs for the Disabled website.

Good zoo. My favourite animal was the eagle but there were plenty of favourites, too: elephants, giraffes, zebras, flamingos, penguins, sealions, alpacas, lions, chimps, bongos, giant anteaters, lemurs, a reptile house, and plenty of others.

It is built into the side of a hill and is somehow hillier than the Welsh Mountain Zoo. Worse, the cafe at the bottom of the hill was closed so we had to walk all the way up to the treetops cafe to get some lunch. You do get a wonderful view from the top, though.

They have lots of reptiles.

I learnt some cool stuff. Did you know, for example, that an axolotl is a real creature and not just made up by Minecraft?

I was a bit unsure at first. Everything is in one room and you can get around it in around 30-45 minutes. That in itself feels like not much for the entry fee. And there were no talks on. But it turns out they just had the wrong sign up for the talk times and they started 30 minutes later.

Once the talks started, they were great. We went to two, spaced 90 minutes apart, with Dr Polly who brought out three animals each time. She told us a bit about them and then we got the chance to touch them. Snakes are lovely and soft: no wonder they used to make stuff out of their skin. Each talk was 30 minutes so there was a good hour of live stuff going on which made it well worth the visit.

There is a small cafe selling toasties where you can grab some lunch.

As far as I know, this horse can’t talk. But it’s a nice picture, so I thought I would post it anyway.

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.

Happy Darwin Day!

Pandas get a bad rap. They don’t mate at the best of times. They spend all of their time eating bamboo, which tends to kill their sex drive. And comments to the effective of it being their own fault that they are endangered are common.

Here is Ricky Gervais making just such a point:

But this is unfair. And best explained by this Douglas Adams lecture that took place at the University of California.

You have probably noticed that pandas are massive. They don’t have many predators. Even humans, who sit here in the food chain, don’t eat them. So they don’t die very often.

And Mother Nature is pretty smart. Well, dumb, but nevertheless, natural selection works it out in the end. So, when you have a species with no real predators, they don’t procreate very often because otherwise there would be too many of them. They are designed to have very few babies.

Then humans come along, destroy most of the natural habitat and wonder why pandas cannot replace themselves fast enough.

I read The Wind in the Willows many times as a child. It is a lovely story so while looking for a low cognitive load and pleasant read, it seemed like an excellent choice. It was. It is such a fun story and moves at a pace that it is difficult to get bored. There was none of the usual awkward drag I find plagues most novels at least once. This is despite, or possibly in part because, I knew what was coming next.