Home away from Home

So today I moved into my new home for the next 4-6 weeks :) The lovely Jamie and his family are letting me stay with them til I find something more permanent and I really can't thank them enough. 

Just so mum knows I'm not living under the stairs or anything...

The view from my window

After I got settled in I took the family dog Cado ( with an 'a' as in 'hat') for a walk down the lane to get to Durrell so here is a basic view of what it's like for me to get to work each morning...

Cado ! For those interested he's a collie/lab mix and he's very friendly and well behaved

So yeah, from here on in things will get a bit more routine and I should be able to settle down quite comfortably and not be quite so frantic. Also, to be quite honest I think everything that could have possibly gone wrong now has so "touch-wood" from here on in everything should be fine and dandy :)

Have a lovely day everyone and I hope you're enjoying your time as much as I am mine,

xx

Another Day in Paradise

Hello Again,

Today was yet another eventful today, I spent the day at the zoo and I moved ! I spent many hours exploring the grounds of the park and seeing the most amazing exhibits and wonderful animals and I feel exceptionally privileged to have had the opportunity even to have visited it, let alone to be able to get involved and work here. I've had a request for more pictures so brace yourself for what is about to follow! 

First up, the birds...I'll label what I can but to be honest some of them I just don't remember.

Euphonia

Red-Tailed Laughingthrush

Turaco

Meller's Duck

Sunda Wrinkled Hornbill

Red Breasted Goose - these are evil btw...beware!

Northern Bald Ibis

Echo Parakeet

White-Naped Crane

From there we'll go to the bats. Durrell has set up a really fantastic bat tunnel from recycled materials with a separate bat "hospital" where those which can't fly or are recovering from injury can be separated from the dominant males and don't have so far to fall etc. They have around 40 Livingstone Fruit Bats and around 15 or so Rodrigues Fruit Bats, both of which are highly endangered. They're absolutely adorable and are basically like teddy bears with wings :)

The Bat Cave

Rodrigues Bats are smaller and brown

Livingstone Bats are large and black

Now onto...Macacques. But to get there we go past this really pretty lookout where you can see back down into where the stream ( see previous post) pools to form a reed bed for the Flamingoes.

So these are Sulawesi Black Crested Macacques and when I got there they were inside enjoying their lunch...

Baby Monkey...

seeing him try and climb up there was actually the cutest thing ever...

Macacques lead onto Eva the Maned Wolf. I was super excited to see her as it was quite hot when I was there and I didn't expect her to be out but there she was...

Next stop...the woods ! In the centre of the park is a large open woodland where the Silvery Gibbons and the Emperor Tamarins can live a relatively free range existence. They still have dens they can come back to in the night or if it's cold but for the most part they live the closest thing to a "wild" life that I can imagine in a zoo.

If you go down to the woods today...

Emperor Tamarin

Can you spot the tamarin...


Continuing on our journey we get to the Gorillas !!!!

Badongo the Silverback and successor to Ya Kwanza

It's very tiring being a Gorilla...

Gorillas typically live in harems, in this case there are 4 females and one silverback

This will seem random but then we cut through the Discovery Desert and we have meercats ( see previous post) and this is a baby Giant Galapagos Tortoise. It's about the same size at the moment as a regular tortoise but in about 150 years or so it'll grow to about 4ft large !

Nearing the end now we get to the Madagascar section. As some of you may know the Durrell trust, and indeed the Durrell family, have been heavily involved in work in Madagascar for the past 30 years or so and have many in situ conservation programs there as well as many animals at the zoo itself. Gerald Durrell became almost infatuated with the country and as such the Kirindy Forest (Madagascar) section of the zoo is quite large. Here we have Alaotran Gentle Lemurs, Ring-tailed Lemurs, Aye-Aye's, Ruffed Lemurs, Madagascan Jumping Rats, Madagascan Pochard ducks, Red-Fronted Brown Lemurs and more...

Alaotran Gentle Lemur

Ring-tailed Lemurs

AyeAye !! Apologies for the shot but they'e nocturnal and there's no flash so it was dead hard trying to get this...if you don't know much about the Aye Aye I would recommend looking it up or even youtube-ing Stephen Fry's documentary with them as they're fascinating creatures with a very bad rep! They're about the size of a cat with a large brush tail like a foxes (see above) teddy bear ears and large, round eyes. Their main feature are their fingers which are very long and bony, particularly the middle digit, and they use them for digging out nectar and fruit etc. this means that they walk on the heels of their palms as otherwise their long fingers would get in the way. 

The mysterious shadow of the Aye-Aye, I just put this in because it really shows of the body shape of the animal - very large ears and a large tail - actually they're a bit like the demented cousin of a Vulpix ( which for the uninitiated is a Pokemon)

Last but certainly not least we get to some of my favourites, Wolfie and Barbara, the Andean bears. They're very old, very slow and very sweet and I just adore them :)

Wolfgang, the male, is in good condition - largely due to the fact that he steals most of Barbie's food - and is quite large. 

Barbara - top right - is much smaller than Wolfie and her fur is a bit scrappy - but given how old she is she's doing pretty well.

So that's the end of the tour for now but do bear in mind ( heh heh) that this is only about half of the animals at the zoo ( you're probably noticing a dearth of reptiles/amphibians!)  and I simply did not have the chance or the time to see and photograph everything today. So as far as the zoo is concerned I'll leave it there for now but stay tuned for more details of the migration :)

xx

A very eventful day!

Hi all,

So today was my first day working at Durrell! I've started on the Bats and Marmosets section which absolutely fantastic! Today I got introduced to everything - sort of an orientation - so I got to see the Bats ( they have Livingston and Rodrigues bats), Andean bears, Pied and Emperor Tamarins, Golden and Black Lion Tamarins, Coatis, Otters and Howler Monkeys. Everyone has been really lovely and helped me start to settle in and it made things really easy :)
It was my first time into the zoo itself as well and I have to say it's easily the most beautiful zoo I've ever been in. All of the flowers are in bloom and the whole place is lucious with greenery and flower beds. The enclosures for all of the animals are of amazing quality and there's even a woodland in the middle of the zoo for the tamarins and marmosets so they can be free ranging !



A stream and flower bed running through the centre of the zoo

The Mammal Department


Also, just as a side-note, I think everyone should be super-duper proud of me as I had to put my hands into a cage filled with locusts and pick up 60 of them to feed to the tamarins! Many of you will know that I really, really, immensely dislike crickets, grasshoppers and locusts etc. so this was a true test of will for me !! But I did it in the end and I'm sure it can only get easier as I get used to them :)

During my lunch break I had a wander ( read: I literally ran around the zoo screaming) and saw as much as I could but I'm going in tomorrow as an offical visitor on my day off and so I'll have some better photos for you then. But for now here are some pictures I took of what I deemed to be the most important things to see, i.e. the Gorillas, the Orangs and the meercats :) I also saw some flamingoes on the way which were pretty dang cool as well :)



Pink Flamingoes





An Orangutan and a gibbon ( to the left)



Then after work finished we had a Jubilee celebration which doubled as a leaving party for some of the other students. There were cakes and Pimms all round and it was a really great way to meet people :)



An essential Jubilee accessory



To say goodbye to the students who have to leave we all took photos with Gerald Durrell and then with Jambo the Gorilla :)

And now I shall leave you with a piece of unbelievably amazingly fantastic news. The one and only Sir David Attenborough is coming to Durrell on July 5th and he's coming to speak to the Marms department !!! I. might. get. to. meet. and. maybe. even. talk. to. him. !!!!!!!!!!!! eek.

xx