sleepover at Whipsnade (part i)

[kaberett]

I left off, last night, at the end of the Keeper for a Day activities.

First order of the day was having an hour and a half, or thereabouts, to sort ourselves out in our lodge, and sit on the porch overlooking the Downs with a drink (agnostic as to alcohol content).

And then, eventually, we set off back across the zoo for dinner.

First stop was the eastern bongo and sitatunga enclosure. A bongo obligingly came up very close to us: I had apparently spent a bunch of time in their general vicinity previously (e.g. Belfast zoo has some) but had never previously stopped to actually pay attention to them, and it turns out that they are gorgeous. This was also a prompt to explain to us the reasoning behind (1) multi-species enclosures, and (2) having enclosures for predator and prey immediately adjacent one another -- in this case, the predator species is the African wild/hunting dog; the idea is that keeping prey animals alongside their predators with lots of space to move away from them (and please be aware I'm summarising crudely here) gives important practice at cross-species interaction, including Wanting To Nope All The Way Off, that is extremely valuable if and when one e.g. attempts to reintroduce critically endangered species to the wild.

Then we moved on to the white rhinos, i.e the species we hadn't hung out with much earlier in the day: at this point I became extremely glad that I'd got the binoculars out and then actually remembered to bring them with us, because A spotted a mama duck and then spotted her ducklings popping up and down in the grass behind her and it was great. Also we saw the baby rhino; also we had explanations about the breeding/conservation programme, the herd dynamics, and the extent to which the 24/7 security presence at the zoo is for the benefit of said white rhinos.

Onward: we stopped off at the chimpanzees again, this time to watch them being given pepper. Mostly it was flung onto the roof of their caged area to encourage them to climb for it; a few bits wound up on the floor out of easy reach and therefore we got to observe TOOL USE (i.e. selection and application of a sufficiently long branch, in a way that I kept thinking "... that's not going to work" about, until it did!).

We then paused by the European bison (to talk about their reintroduction!), the old elephant house (listed building, cannot be used for anything but its original purpose, absolutely not fit for purpose and entirely superseded, also full of asbestos), a baby wallaby (BABY WALLABY), and the tigers. The tigers we got quite a lot of explanation about in re husbandry -- how (much) they get fed, how they're coping with having two males in the same enclosure, and how to break up a tiger fight (foam fire extinguisher).

And then we had dinner! Which was perfectly serviceable but not particularly exciting pasta, and also what was -- given how much of the day we had spent on the move -- a very welcome warm chocolate brownie + ice cream.

And then it was still not time for bed! But it very much is now, so I'll talk about who we visited on our way back to the cabins in tomorrow's instalment :)

Comments

[cesy]

This all sounds so great!

[lunabee34]

It just gets better and better!

[forests_of_fire]

this sounds so amazing!!