Wingham Wildlife Park

There are a few animal parks near to Canterbury, including Howletts and Wildwood, but this time we went to Wingham Wildlife Park.  We chose here because Nic likes lemurs, and we had seen in the local paper that as well as having a few species of lemurs generally, they had some baby lemurs.

Sadly, when we got there we discovered that we couldn't actually see the baby lemurs, but we still got to walk through the ringtail enclosure and to see Nic's favourites, the red ruffed lemurs.  It was a hot day, so like most of the animals, they weren't doing much, but it was still nice to see them.  Nic was wearing his red ruffed lemur t-shirt just in case it helped to get their attention - but it didn't.

The park is small but is quite good.  They have lions, tigers and a black puma amongst their big cats, and I always enjoy watching them.  They also have otters, some of which are trained to do a few tricks for some extra food.

The meerkats are fun as you can feed them.  We had bought some meal worms for them at the entrance.  I had assumed that they were dead, so was a bit surprised to find them wriggling in the tub.  I am a bit squeamish about live things like that, so considered myself to be pretty brave when I picked them out and fed them to the meerkats. 

The meerkats were at least quite appreciative and gave lots of little squeaks of joy at receiving these delicacies. We were slightly concerned that the meerkat on guard duty was so easily distracted by a worm being thrown in it's direction, but perhaps they have worked out that nothing is actually going to eat them here.

My mum took rather a shine to a couple of raccoons; they were happy to take a shine to her too if she offered an illicit meal worm.  They spotted the tub in her hand and one in particular started climbing up the fence and sticking out its paw to her.

Having had such fun with the penguins in the Falklands and Antarctica, we had to go and see the penguins they had here.  They were equally as naughty as their wild counterparts; no sooner had I lowered my camera into their enclosure to take a photo, than one or two of them were up trying to peck at it!

In the nocturnal section, we managed to get a good look at the bats which were busy hanging upside down and eating fruit.

There were lots of other animals of course but these were our favourites and gave us the most amusement.  Although we weren't too old to enjoy the farm section, where you can feed the goats, pigs, donkeys, alpaca, and if you are lucky, the wallabies.  Who says zoos are just for kids??