BWPA Awards

Another thank you from me to all of you who again have congratulated me, this time on my photograph awarded in the British Wildlife Photography Awards.

The above photo of Flo has been commended in the BWPA "Animal Portrait" category, and has been used by many newspapers this past weekend as one of the photos to advertise the awards. It will appear in  a book and exhibition, and I will be attending the awards next month to see the opening of the exhibition.

I have been very lucky this year with my photos, and of course am very pleased with the Countryfile competition, but this award means much more to me as is a competition a lot of the professional photographers enter, and my photo will now be in a book alongside the likes of Andy Rouse, Mark Hamblin and Danny Green etc.

Badgers on the move

Last Thursday we had a little move around with our badgers. For the past couple of weeks we have been working on our semi-wild badger sett, preparing it for a family of badgers. At the same time we wanted to move our two friendly badgers Titch and Honey from their off display enclosure to on view. Therefore we decided to move our badgers from the display sett out on to the nature reserve, leaving hand-reared Toby behind, and introduce Titch and Honey to Toby in the main enclosure.

We started by catching up the four badgers, Murray, Humbug, Bubble and Squeak from the main pen and drove them out to the wild sett.

After adding some fresh straw for them to drag in to make their bedding, we slowly introduced them one at a time to their new home.

Once they had all been re-homed safely it was time to collect Titch and Honey and introduce them to their new home.

It wasn't long until Honey was out and about and exploring her new home. Normally for the badger keeper talk we only had Toby make an appearance, and one or two of the others on a rare appearance. But already this pas weekend has seen both Toby and Titch come out for the talk. I am sure it will just be a matter of time until Honey settles on to her new home too and joins them in the afternoon.

As for the now semi-wild badgers... they have settled in extremely well. They are fenced in to an extremely large area, and we still feed them daily. Their sett is visible from the Wetland Boardwalk, and I wouldn't be surprised for you to see them in the late afternoon as the light starts to darken.

New Otter, Grace

On Sunday, we introduced a new otter to our collection. Above is a photo of "Grace" who came to us from the New Forest Wildlife Park, in the New Forest. Originally Grace was a wild orphan cub, but after being rehabilitated by the NFWP they were unable to get the cooperation from local landowners to allow her to be released back where she came from. Having been in captivity now for nearly 3 years, it is believed she is told old to be returned and so needed a permanent new home.

With Stirling having recently lost his mate, we thought we could offer here that home. The hope is he will pair  up nicely with Stirling in the future and possibly even mate to produce more otter cubs.

As you can see from Ian Rentoul's photographs above, she was shy at first to enter her new enclosure, but was soon rushing out to explore. If you come to the Centre she is now in our third otter pen, but is still very shy so you will have to be patient to get a glimpse of her while she settles in.

Thanks to Ian for his photographs of her release. To see more of Ian's photos check out his flickr page linked.