Last week we drove past the British Wildlife Centre which looked rather good so today we packed up a picnic and headed off for that. We stopped for a brief look round a car boot sale which has just started on Sundays on the airfield we live near and Ady and Davies found a telescope for 50p which seems in perfect working order so they plan to do some stargazing with that some time soon.
We got to the centre around 1130am. It’s a fab place, fairly small but with big enclosures where they have all sorts of British wild animals including foxes, badgers (;)), stoat, weasels, mink, polecats, rats (grey and black), mice (all sorts), voles, squirrels (grey, red and a white one!), deer, hedgehogs, moles, grass snakes, adders, rabbits, otters, wildcats and a whole load of birds: pheasants, various owls, buzzards, kestrels, herons, ducks. There were keeper talks every half an hour (most were repeated twice through the day) so we based ourselves round those and went to the talks on red squirrels, foxes, otters, badgers and wild cats. The keepers were around all the time so we did plenty of chatting to them during the day too.
It rained fairly heavily a couple of times but we had umbrellas and there was a small theatre with two films running on a loop so we watched those too. One about British wildlife from the Ice Age til the present day including animals like bears and wolves when they lived here and why they died out. Also a film about a day in the life of a vole which only Davies and I stayed to watch and had us in fits of laughter at the dramatic narration 😆
It all tied in rather nicely with a book about British mammals that we half read from the library recently after we saw the adders at Pulborough and various other nature and wildlife things that seem to have cropped up lately. I was really surprised by just how much Davies and Scarlett knew about various animals and the questions they asked the keepers were really sensible and thought out ones. Scarlett knew loads about birds and loved the idea of working somewhere like the wildlife centre one day :).
Loads of pics on flickr as all four of us had a camera today – the children each have a ‘retired’ work camera of Ady’s 😆
It was a really good place, well worth a visit. We were tempted to get season tickets as I could see us going again, it’s only half an hours drive from home, but we have other stuff we want to do this month and we are still very hopeful we won’t be living here this time next year so we refrained.
Home for baths for everyone and roast chicken then a couple of chapters of Famous Five before bed for Davies and Scarlett which was ridiculously late, again. It’s been a really good weekend though, nice days out and about, just what we’ve not had enough of lately :).
We went there last year with Shinies and had a great day, though it may not be the same place actually as it’s an hour from us. Near East Grinstead?
Comment by Roslyn — 28 April 2008 @ 9:25 am
That looks a wonderful day out and sounds like a very restorative weekend
Comment by Ali — 28 April 2008 @ 9:33 am