It was my birthday at the beginning of July, and I spent it exploring a safari park for the very first time.
Another zoo birthday trip. Shocker!
We visited Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire- somewhere I've wanted to visit for over twenty years, thanks to the TV show Animal Park. It's a couple of hours drive from home in Oxfordshire, so I never had, but after discovering that they had become the first zoo in Britain to add koalas and wombats to their menagerie (at least in my life time), I had to go see them. And I'm so glad we did as we had a fantastic time.
We did the safari first, and it was so much fun driving around and spotting so many cool animals in the English countryside, It kinda looked and felt like being in Jurassic Park without the dinosaurs. But, luckily for us, most of the animals on the other side of our car were a little less terrifying and inclined to eat us. (Though, only having a car between us and the big cats definitely got the heart-racing a little). We got to see all kinds of awesome animals including giraffes, rhinos, lions, cheetahs, tigers, wolves, camels, warthogs, deer, macaques, vultures, pelicans, and many more. I think the only animals we didn't spot were the hyenas, and elephant, which was surprising as the enclosures were big enough for everything to hide if they wanted to. It was lovely to see most of the animals given acres of space and kept in large family groups, allowing them to live as naturally as any animal can in captivity. I've never seen animals kept so well before, and you could see the difference in how content and healthy they looked.
Sorry for the quality of the photos from the safari section. My camera didn't want to cooperate through windows.
The highlight of the safari for me- besides seeing a warthog and a white Bactrian camel for the first time- was getting to feed the deer. You could buy little pots of deer pellets from a kiosk in their paddock, and then pull over and feed them out of the car window, so of course, we had to do it. I got to feed two of them at the same time, and they were huge and surprisingly strong, but so gentle and patient at the same time. I was even able to give one of them chin scratches while she ate.
We also all enjoyed driving in with the macaques, and having them climb all over the car. There must've been well over a hundred of them, including dozens of babies, and they were fearless. They threw themselves at the cars, and clambered over everything from the windscreens to the wing mirrors. They were a lot of fun to watch- especially when one started pulling the windscreen wipers off the car in front of us. Luckily, my brother-in-law had had the good sense to take the aerial off the car before we went in, and we only came away with a few tiny teeth marks on the roof, but if you don't want to risk your car, the route does allow you to skip the macaques without missing anything else. We just chose to risk it for the experience, and it was so worth it.
The safari took a couple of hours to complete, and afterwards, we parked up and explored the zoo. It's only small, but they had a really interesting collection of animals to see that you don't see everywhere, so I really enjoyed myself. There were animals you'd expect to see like meerkats, tamarins, macaws, and porcupines, more unusual animals like the amazing binturong, aardvarks, and adorable little fennec foxes, and even some animals we'd never seen before like koalas, hairy-nosed wombats, giant river otters, and an adorable little rat-like marsupial called a brush-nosed bettong.
It's not often I see an animal I've never seen before, so seeing several made my day. I was amazed by the size of the otters- they were almost as big as basset hounds, and so much cuter than they look in photos or on TV.
The koalas were absolutely adorable, and I now understand Sheldon Cooper's koala-face- I was watching them exactly the same way. The wombat was sadly asleep in its den, so I didn't get a good look at it, but it was another little cutie I wanted to smuggle home.
Another highlight of the day was feeding nectar to the rainbow lorikeets in their walk-through aviary. Sadly, none of them landed on me, but I got to feed this sweet little guy. I could feel his little tongue lapping up the nectar through the pot, and that's something I never thought I'd say!
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