Studio Lusitania: Cotswold Wildlife Park and Gardens

I've been meaning to make this post for a while, but my laptop managed to completely disorganise my photos when I transferred them from my SD card, and it's taken me a bit to gather the patience to sort through them and sort of get them in order. These still aren't in chronological order, it's been so long I've kinda forgotten what we saw first, but at least all the animals of the same species are sort of grouped together, now.

We visited the CWP back in May - I had a day off from work, and took the chance to meet up with a friend (whom I'd only known online thus far!!) who was super excited to go, too.

According to its website, the Cotswolds Wildlife Park has one of the UK's largest zoological collections, with over 260 different species of animals spread over 160 acres of land. It's huge - we got there at noon and didn't finish exploring until 5, an hour from closing time, and I'm quite sure we still missed a couple of things.

It was a cold and rainy day, which was great because there weren't many people about and the animals were fairly active, but not so great because we got a bit soaked. 😁

The ring-tailed lemurs had a walk-in enclosure, which was pretty cool!

I didn't touch any of them because I was a bit scared of being bitten (they're still wild animals, after all) but they all swarmed me and started licking my shoes. No idea what that was about, but I could feel their little tongues on my feet!

The slender-tailed meerkats are always fun to watch 😁

We got to the Humboldt penguins right as feeding time was happening, which was pretty good timing. The keepers were explaining the penguins' names, the meaning of their arm bands, and their relationships.

(the one jumping down from the step kinda looks like he's just hovering in mid-air!)

A kookaburra:

Capybaras! Honestly, they were one of the main reasons I wanted to visit the park. I love capybaras, and I'd never seen one in the flesh.

Giraffe:

Parma wallaby:

African openbill stork:

African crested porcupine:

Chapman's zebras! (they didn't come any closer, sadly...)

White-faced owl:

Siamang. Very blurry, because he kept moving around and being silly! This was the best one I managed to get.

Sleepy, beautiful lions.

(they were following a plane, here!)

The disappearance of a tawny frogmouth 😁 He wasn't very happy to see us!

Sleeping red panda:

Yellow mongoose: (mongeese? what's the plural for them, anyway?)

Prairie dog:

One of the Park's main attractions are its Southern white rhinos, which can be seen happily grazing on the manor's lawn. Sadly we only spotted them while we were taking the train tour, and when we came back for better pictures, they'd retired for the night.