Members Evening

A big THANK YOU to all the members who joined us on our annual members evening this past Saturday. Once again it was a huge success with well over 100 of you turning out for the extended opening hours and extra keeper talks.

After owner David Mill's welcome talk we took you to the Red Squirrel walk-through enclosure for an evening look at our semi-free range squirrels. After I fed "Anthony" it seemed that the squirrels shied away a little, but many of you reported back that there were some in the background while I was talking... and many of you stayed there for the whole evening and were rewarded by most of our 25 squirrels coming out and even coming up very close to you.

I always try to offer one new talk not done before, and this year I took the gamble of the Water Vole. Our island display is pretty good at the moment, and the voles are very comfortable being out and about while visitors watch them close by... but would they come out for the 15 minutes I wanted them to?

Well they did. I must confess I kept a little food back for them, but it seemed to work, 5 of our voles were very visible while I was talking about them and many of you came up to me saying that it was the highlight of the night.

We ended the evening with a static display of our owls. We are only one of two Centres in the UK to house all 7 owls, and we talked about them all while showing them round the dell. It was quite a spectacle seeing the owls all together down in the dell amd is certainly something we may try to repeat in the future.

Of course the usual animals feeds were present, and our two young orphaned badger cubs were on show. The feedback we have had so far is extremely positive and we look forward to announcing a date for a Winters members day nearer the end of the year.

Thank you once again.

Matt