kaberett | sleepover at Whipsnade (part ii) (Reply)

I am dragging this write-up out rather more than I intended to, but such (currently) is life...

At this point it is probably helpful to provide some orientation (possibly even this would have been the case sooner...) so here's a map. Lookout Lodge, where we were sleeping, is between Africa and Europe on the right-hand edge of the map, just next door to the Reindeer. Meals were at the restaurant labelled BASE CAMP, in between Base Camp and Asia.

So first of all we headed for the flamingoes, via the pond marked "pelicans" (which we didn't see) that actually contained bar-headed geese and emperor geese (both of which I have abruptly become very fond of) and also MORE DUCKLINGS. The flamingoes were being extremely raucous: it is apparently Time To Make Nests And Also Babies season, which involves A Lot Of Yelling. Some had clearly paired off already; some were courting; some were Just Yell. We were told that the flock is generally on the older side (20-40, I think they said) and need the keepers to actually start building nests in order to get around to reproducing; we were also informed that the electric fencing around the enclosure was primarily to keep foxes out. Fact that most made my brain go bzzt: the kind of flamingo we were looking at? tops out at a weight of around 2.8 kg. (And I was once again very glad for the binoculars: we got to watch them FLUFF and FLAP and it was Great.)

Next we paused briefly at the cheetahs, and then the really special bit happened: dusk was rapidly approaching; we were the only people in the zoo apart from the keepers who were babysitting us, presumably a handful of others on late-night chores, and security; and so we got to see a genuinely stunning variety of behaviours of crepuscular and nocturnal animals one normally only ever observes sleeping.

I was absolutely delighted by the aardvarks: we'd swung by their enclosure earlier and I think we saw one sleeping (though I might be confusing that with Shepreth), but getting to scatter-feed and both watch and listen to them snuffling about with their snuffly little noses was brilliant.

The last stop of the evening was the new lionesses. They're still settling in and apparently mostly quite shy during the day, but when it was just us -- and in particular when some members of our party were using mobility scooters, which the lions had not previously had (enough of) a chance to get used to and start ignoring -- they did eventually emerge and start stalking us!

And then all the bats came out! And we were herded off to bed. :)

The following morning we were up and about -- having been walked to breakfast and seen a parade of the bar-headed geese en route -- a good ninety minutes before the zoo opened to the public. Alas I did not take notes as we were going along (or in the immediate aftermath), nor any photos, so I'm going to be reconstructing this after the fact rather more than I did any of the others, but let's see...

First of all, I think, we went via the red pandas. (Definitely we visited the red pandas while supervised at some point.) Once again I had the binoculars; once again I was very grateful for them; we spotted (thanks be to A) both of them, and I spent enough time staring at them to have totally forgotten what we had explained to us.

The visit to the otters was cut short when it became apparent that they had not yet woken themselves up; instead we moved fairly rapidly on to the ring-tailed lemurs. Here we had to be extremely careful entering the walk-through enclosure because, we were told, the lemurs are Extremely Prone to escape attempts -- not because they want to escape but because they have learned that if they can tailgate out, and then hang out in a tree near the enclosure, they are guaranteed Their Favourite Snacks. (I regret to inform you that enough time has elapsed that I've totally forgotten what their favourite snacks actually are.) So this was fun in part because they are preposterous wee animals and in part because we had never actually made it into the lemur enclosure when left to our own devices, so getting to see a whole new bit of zoo was lovely!

Two last animals: we went by the wild boar with their HOARD OF SQUEALING (tiny stripy) PIGLETS and provided enrichment in the form of scatter-feeding while ourselves being enriched through explanation of the (... accidental...) reintroduction to the wild in the UK; and then we finished by the brown bears, with an explanation of the dynamics of the current group and the history of the zoo: there have been brown bears kept in that enclosure continuously since the zoo was founded, which is highly unusual not least in that the enclosure is still considered appropriate to keep bears in! Apparently it was one of the fairly early experiments in keeping animals in more "natural" environments, as opposed to being displayed in tiny spaces where they were guaranteed to be visible.

And that was that: the zoo opened, the tour ended, and I abruptly became aware of just how special being on site when it was more-or-less empty had been.

We did not actually set off for Shepreth and our Capybara Encounter immediately: we [eta]visited the hippos and SAW the pygmy hippo TRUNDLING,[/eta] got warm drinks, Adam curled up in the car to have a nap, and I plodded myself slowly back up to the otters, who had by this point woken up and were shrieking happily at each other! The babies did not look as baby as all that, any more, and mostly wanted to hide in the shallow water under a bush, but it was still lovely to catch sight of them. :)

We arrived at Shepreth very early, so had lunch and poked around a bit while waiting for The Appointed Hour. We waved to the capybara, en passant, and to the Shetland pony; we wandered around the edge of the lake, saying hello to birds of prey, only to discover that Lunch had Moved; we successfully hunted Lunch down in its new den and ate it. Shepreth's otters were much more visible and much more yelly, and were quite clearly shouting at anybody who walked past for Treats Now Please And Thank You except for the one (1) baby who kept getting distracted by ROLLING ONTO THEIR BACK and PLAYING WITH A ROCK. I was enchanted, obviously.

Then past the tigers and through the rescue rabbit section, which made A very happy; on through the BATS, which were much more active and also much more visible than last time we visited; past various other small furry critters and also the snowy owl who is destined to be joined by Freya (whom we met on Tuesday) in the near future; and then CAPYBARA including the EIGHT-MONTH-OLD BABIES. We got: bowls of guinea pig feed to distributed around us, plus bamboo (with leaves still attached) to hold on to one end of while the capybara nibbled the other. Leaves were definitely still the Preferred Special Treat with the bark/stems/etc being consumed only once all of the leaves were gone. We'd been told that if they came up to us we were allowed to scritch, which I absolutely took advantage of at the point where one of them was practically sitting on my foot (and definitely leaning on my leg) in order to munch the bamboo contemplatively! Their hair was surprisingly-to-me coarse (rather more like a pig's than a guinea pig's), and they were very warm and very solid and simultaneously both round and rectangular; alas none of them actually actively solicited scritches from us (which we have previously observed when the people in the enclosure with them were their keepers), but nevertheless this was Very Good.

Once we'd been chivvied back out we paused briefly to visit the (extremely undignified) tortoises, and then decided we had had Very A Week (Good, but Very), and miles to go before we slept.

We finally finished up at a friend's, where we met their guinea pigs (who needed moving so we could pitch our tent in the garden) and their chicken (who very officiously superintended the tent actually going up) and the hamster and, eventually, the rats. On Saturday and Sunday both we visited the horse (as well as our continued interactions with the rest of the menagerie), which was a particular balm to my soul.

And that was the Week Of Animals! So many animals. It was fantastic, I had a great time, I am very lucky, and I have very much enjoyed reliving it piecemeal as I get around to writing it up. :)