On what looked to be a lovely, warm and sunny day, we went off to take a look at a place I never knew existed, quite close to where we live. It is called Beaver Water World, largely because it has some beavers, but I have to say we didn't see them - they didn't seem to be about during our visit.
It is an interesting little place, which has a small selection of animals, most of which have been rescued because they were unwanted pets. People seem to keep the most extraordinary things as pets, then get bored with them and want rid of them.
There's quite a selection of birds, most of which were behind mesh in cages and hard to photograph. The cages have to be so sturdy because a number of animals have been stolen. There was quite a selection of the sort of tropical bird normally kept as a pet - Budgerigars, Parrots, Lovebirds, Cockatiels. But there were also some more exotic things, like this gorgeous pheasant.
He was quite hard to photograph, as he ran so quickly up and down in front of me, demonstrating his colourful plumage.
There were some more unusual birds; the magnificent chap below is a Snowy Owl.
I think he was quite interested in the visitors, though he was right at the back of his enclosure and not easy to photograph.
There was another owl too - this rather imposing Horned Owl.
He too seemed interested in looking at the visitors, but he was also right at the back of his cage. And as you can see, the two ear-tufts are stuck underneath something, so I didn't manage a very good photograph.
Not all of the birds are in cages, there are some chickens which are allowed to wander about. Some of them were quite fascinating, notably a pair of what looked like very hairy chickens, which are called Silky chickens. I would have included a photo, but they were rather camera shy. One sat inside a bush, and the other was very busy preening its feathers; whenever it saw me with the camera, it turned its head away from me, so it just looked like a huge ball of rippling reddish-brown hair.
The other animals I had very little luck with photographing were the Long-tailed Lemurs. They have such lovely, friendly little pointed faces, and were scampering about or eating their lunch, so they would have made very good subjects. Unfortunately, one of them was stolen last year and they are kept behind glass. With the sun at the wrong angle, my photos are full of reflections of the trees around, and not worth looking at.
I had better luck with the Meercats.
I don't know if these were also rescue animals, but they seemed pretty comfortable here, though they are quite small and so perhaps quite young. There are only three of them. They took turns in standing sentinel though - and quickly saw off a big magpie which came in and wanted to share their lunch, which they guarded jealously.
After that, we reached the Beaver enclosure, but the beavers were not out and about, I'm afraid. However, in a field close by were a couple of Muntjac Deer.
I think there were more than two, but the others were inside their little shelters, so we couldn't see them.
After the outdoor animals, we went outside to look at the reptiles, of which there are rather a lot, kept in extremely tropical conditions. These were all unwanted pets, and it really amazed me that somebody would think a crocodile or a boa-constrictor would make a suitable pet. I could - just - understand somebody thinking they would like terrapins or toads and then wanting to get rid of them when they proved uninteresting or got too big. But who on earth wants to keep a crocodile - especially in this country? And there were 2 of them, from two different homes that didn't want them any longer.
As well as the boa-constrictor, there were two pythons, one very big and one absolutely enormous, with a body as thick as my thigh. It is hard to believe that people would want to keep such a thing in their home.
There were quite a few iguanas, of which this was the biggest.
And he certainly was big; his body was two or three feet long, in fact I think he was bigger than the smaller crocodile!
There were quite a few Tropical fish to admire as well, the place sells exotic fish and fish tanks as well as small animals like rabbits, mice and gerbils. They also sell pond plants and fish for the garden pond. We though about getting some for our pond, but we'd need to get the pond pump working. And I think any fish might fall prey to passing herons - or even the huge black birds which we regularly see in our garden, rooks or possibly ravens, I'm not sure which.
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