Polecat shift

A slight rearrangement of our polecats has freed up our pen next to the mink enclosure. "Velvet" & "Storm" who were in there have now moved opposite into one of our double weasel pens. The polecat which was in there has been moved to the first of three stoat pens opposite the water voles and next to deer corner, and the polecat in there has been introduced with the 2 which were already in the other double stoat pen.....

Keeping up?..... well, this leaves our main polecat enclosure next to the mink empty. As we did last year, we are going to use that pen as a photo set over the Spring and Summer evenings for any of our photographic groups we have booked in. Here photographers will be able to get fairly natural looking shots of our young cubs we have around, including our new badger cubs.

Regular visitors will be pleased to know that our three tame fallow deer, "Bambi", "Thumper" & "Bracken" have been moved back on to display for the Easter period. They are back in Deer Corner and still as friendly as ever. We had moved them to a different paddock to Winter and allow their main home to re establish itself, but now they are back to where they can keep an eye on any visitors we have.

On the move

Quite a few of our animals are being moved around at the moment, just to make way for new arrivals and setting up for photographic displays and breeding programmes etc. I will keep you up-to-date over the next few days with the where a bouts of the animals, but thought I would start of with the raptors and owls as they may be the most confusing...

OK, you ready?..... here I go....

The buzzards, "Bella" & "Blizzard" have moved off-site temporarily until their new aviary has been built. They will eventually be going opposite the other buzzard aviary and next to the otter pond on the way to the nature reserve. This of course leaves their old aviary free...

Into which we have moved our eagle owls, "Igor" & "Doina" This will give them much more space and free up their old aviary. This we are dividing into three smaller aviaries to hold the other British species of owls in, thus completing the set and having all 7 owl types in one area of the centre.

Into one will go our long-eared owl pair, "Quil" & "Embry" A second aviary will be saved for our short-eared owls, for which we are currently on a waiting list. The third will be home to our new pair of barn owls...

We will still of course keep "Milo" and "Mrs Milo" in the barn, but thought it would be nice to have all the owl types on show in our bird area. Today we welcomed 2 new barn owls to the centre, currently housed off-site until their new home has been done. Pictured above is "Cleo", I will let our new pair settle in before subjecting them to the camera lens.

Sunday 28th March

This past week saw the latest issue of "Surrey Life" hit the stores. It includes an article on the BWC and the opening of our red squirrel walk-through enclosure.

Good weekend, very busy here despite the threat of showers both Saturday and todays afternoon. Many thank to friend of the centre, Gary K Mann, for bringing us down some trout to feed to the otters. Needless to say they loved it, except Kernow, above, who seemed much more content in just swimming around and seeing what everyone was doing.

Just a reminder that we are still open during the week for the next three weeks so hope many of you can make it down here to see what we have been doing over the last few months.

There will possibly be little news to report while we are open so I hope to update you all with pictures, videos and species facts over the next couple of weeks to keep your interest up.