Last Monday, I turned another year older, and since I'm not one for wild parties (introvert alert!), I chose to spend the afternoon wandering around my local zoo, The Cotswold Wildlife Park, with my Mum in the blistering 33'C heat.
I don't know why I thought visiting a zoo was a good idea during a heatwave, since I hate the heat, and have been finding it unbearable these past few weeks, but I didn't want to spend my entire birthday at home doing nothing, so I decided to brave it. Well, you guys know how much I love a good trip to the zoo!
Naturally, this wasn't my first visit to The Cotswold Wildlife Park; I've lived locally to it my entire life and have visited it approximately 98254679 times over the years, with a fair few birthdays spent there since the late eighties. I've even blogged about a couple of my most recent visits (which you'll find links to at the end of this post).
As a huge animal lover, it's always been one of my favourite places, and even after a life time of visits, I still enjoy each one, and like to fit in at least one visit each year. Call me biased or sentimental or whatever, but there's just something special about the place that keeps me returning year after year.
You see, The Cotswold Wildlife Park is a little different to your average zoo. It's set on 160 acres of land, with lots of green open space, hundreds of trees, neatly manicured lawns, and gardens, with a two hundred year old gothic manor house in the centre of the park. Many areas of the grounds look more like a stately home than a zoo, and it almost feels like you're viewing a private menagerie at a wealthy aristocrat's Cotswold home instead of a modern day zoo.
With professionally landscaped gardens and flower beds planted around the generously-sized animal enclosures, it's a truly beautiful place to visit, and so much lovelier to wander around than those old ugly old city zoos with small wrought iron cages and concrete enclosures.
You'd expect such a beautiful place to have strict rules about their lawns, but surprisingly, they've very relaxed and allow visitors to walk, relax and picnic on the grass around the park, and also on the picnic benches dotted around near the enclosures of the larger animals. We never take food in with us these days, but we often stopped for a picnic on the great lawn or down by the lions when we were growing up.
It's a relatively small zoo compared to places like Whipsnade Wild Animal Park and Chester Zoo, but The Cotswold Wildlife Park actually has one of the largest zoological collections in the UK with over 260 species of animals. They have show-stoppers like rhinos, lions and giraffes, cute critters such as otters, red pandas, and lemurs, spectacular anacondas, crocodiles, and giant tortoises, feathered favourites like macaws, owls, and penguins, unusual curiosities like binturongs, armadillos, and pallas cats, and so much more. There are so many amazing animals to see here, and quite a few rare creatures I've never seen anywhere else before. There's something for everybody, and enough to interest even the most frequent of zoo visitors.
My favourite animals to see at the wildlife park are the tapirs, giant anteaters, armadillos, pallas cats, giraffe, rhinos, sifakas, and otters, but I enjoy every section- with the exception of the insect house which I prefer to give a wide berth because spiders. I always enjoyed seeing the butterflies and leaf-cutter ants in there when I was younger, though.
We arrived just after half two, which still left us with more than enough time to see everything as the wildlife park is open until 6pm during the summer, and our visits usually average three to four hours. You could easily spend an entire day at the wildlife park as there is so much to see and do- besides the animals and plants, there's a great adventure playground for kids, a train that takes you around the park, a manor house to explore, a restaurant, kiosks, gift shop etc. plus animal talks and feeding times- but after a life time of visits and with no kids in tow, we don't do it all these days. We know the place inside out, so we have our visits down to a fine art. On your first visit, expect to spend a minimum of four hours in the park viewing the animals and plants alone.
My Mum used to take my sisters and I to the wildlife park all the time when we were kids, but I can't remember the last time she and I last visited together (I'm guessing at least sixteen or seventeen years), so it was lovely to visit with her again.
We had a lovely few hours wandering around looking at amazing animals and beautiful plants in the blazing heat, but man alive, it was hot. Swelteringly hot. So hot it was almost hard to believe we were wandering around a zoo in The Cotswolds.
The park was surprisingly quiet considering the sunshine, so it had a refreshingly calm and relaxing atmosphere, with mostly adult couples strolling around and very few screaming kids, so Monday afternoon is clearly a great time to visit if you want to avoid the crowds. We only had a couple of people near us at any one time, so we were able to get a great view at each enclosure, and spend as long as we wanted watching the animals and taking photos without holding anyone up, which was awesome. Not that we stayed long at most enclosures because it was waaay too hot to stand around in the baking heat, and we kept pressing on to find some shade. The ground was so hot it was actually burning my feet through my shoes! (The tarmac on one of the roads we took to get to the wildlife park had actually started to melt!) Fortunately, there are a few sections canopied with trees which provided relief from the heat, so we took advantage of them, and spent longer watching the animals in those areas. We also cooled down with an ice cream from the kiosk near the children's playground, which was so icy cold it actually worked a treat. I don't think I've ever appreciated an ice cream more.
The highlights of our visit include:
♥ Observing a crowned sifaka watching the world go by at the front of his enclosure, and curiously checking us out with those beautiful wide yellow eyes.
♥ Watching the group of otters running around, and the two little squeakers standing up on tree stumps crying for our attention.
♥ Seeing a wolverine for the first time, and watching them tumbling around together in their woodland enclosure- apart from one little guy who was contently taking a snooze on his back.
♥ Getting a peek at the adorable binturong, which looks like a cross between a wolverine, aye-aye, a bear, and a monkey. It also looks like it belongs in the movie 'Labyrinth'. I didn't get a photo because he was indoors behind finger-smudged glass.
♥ Witnessing the maras chasing each other around their enclosure at lightning speed, and one squeezing underneath a fence within its enclosure to outsmart the other..
♥ Watching the tapirs grazing in their paddock- just because they're one of my favourite animals ever.
♥ Taking a rest overlooking the rhino paddock, and watching the impressive animals grazing a few metres away. They all had wet patches around their eyes. I don't know whether rhinos sweat around their eyes in the heat, or if the keepers had applied mud to protect their skin from the sun.
♥ Visiting the giraffe house and getting to see them graze from their eye level.
I'd expected most of the animals to be flaked out in the heat, but most of them were active, and didn't seem phased by it at all. Out of all the enclosures we visited, I think the only animals we weren't able to spot were the lions, giant anteaters, and porcupines. We didn't visit every single section, though, because my Mum was knackered after working eight days in a row and the heat was unbearable, so we missed out part of the walled gardens, the tropical house, some of the aviaries, and the reptile, bat and insect houses in the centre of the park. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to see the armadillos or the anteaters, but I have done it all before so I took what I could get, and enjoyed the areas we did cover.
We only spent about two and a half hours at the park this time, but we had such a lovely visit once again, and it made for such an enjoyable birthday afternoon for this animal lover. It was my first venture out of the house for something other than a medical appointment or quick trip to the supermarket since Easter, so it was really appreciated- even if I pulled all my muscles after months of little use!
If you're ever in Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, or The Cotswolds, you need to fit in a visit to The Cotswold Wildlife Park! You'll find it on the edge of The Cotswolds just two miles from the historic Cotswold town of Burford, twenty miles from Oxford, and twenty two from Cheltenham. It's open every day but Christmas Day, and it's a wonderful place to visit for all ages. You can even bring your dogs in with you (providing they're well behaved and kept on a lead at all times).
Take it from a local; you need to visit this place!
Forget the picturesque Cotswold countryside and the quaint little Cotswold villages, the best place you can visit in the Cotswolds is The Cotswold Wildlife Park! Add it to the top of your Cotswold bucket list!
