Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Amongst said saga with my very much dead com­puter, my inner 6 year old was briefly let loose at Col­chester Zoo.

Col­chester Zoo, which is based in Essex, is “one of the finest zoos in Europe” boast­ing a vast num­ber of exotic and wild anim­als from all over the world. Appar­ently. All I know is, I had one of the best times I’ve ever had since going to Dis­ney World Flor­ida at the age of 6.

I’ve always wanted to go to the zoo as an adult. I know things are meant to be more fun as a kid, but I don’t agree. As a kid, you don’t always appre­ci­ate things, you have a short atten­tion span and you gen­er­ally start to whinge and moan after about 20 minutes, at best. Although I’d been to vari­ous zoos and safari parks as a child, my memory of them ranged from fuzzy frag­ments to non-existence. So the idea of going to the zoo and hav­ing a fun sunny day with a pic­nic and ice-cream, and being able to enjoy and remem­ber every minute, seemed great.

Upon our arrival, we notice we’d been run­ning on a flat tyre. Being ever the optim­ist, I took this as being a bad omen and pre­pared for my high spir­its to go into free-fall. Luck­ily, a lovely, help­ful Zoo Keeper came to our aid and within minutes he had changed it for us and put the spare wheel on. Mean­while, my spir­its remembered they were wear­ing a para­chute. Noth­ing like a couple of dam­sels in dis­tress, eh?

As we’re cur­rently in the midst of a heat­wave here in the UK, the weather was glor­i­ous. Being extraordin­ar­ily fair-skinned, I don’t so much tan as go from milk to boiled lob­ster in about 10 minutes flat. As a pre­cau­tion, I suffered the heat and kept my arms and legs covered. But would you believe it, my wrists and the backs of my hands got burnt [see pho­tos]. I now look like I’m wear­ing tea-stain gloves.

First stop was the “Begin­ning Zone” which fea­tured the most enorm­ous Orag-Utan I have ever seen, his face was pushed up against the glass and his head was twice the size of mine. There was also a big Chimp house, but most of them were hid­ing from the sun, with the excep­tion of a little baby one that was play­ing on a rope swing. I wanted to take him home, he was ador­able. He kept swinging back and forth, but the plat­form he was using was just that bit too high for his stubby little hind legs and he kept tum­bling off and scram­bling back up over and over again, with such determ­in­a­tion. I could have watched him all day, he’s prob­ably still swinging on that same rope now.

The “Aquatic Zone” had a under­wa­ter tun­nel thing that you could walk through and the sea lions swam over your head, then there was the pen­guin pool. For the most part, you were below the water­line and could watch the pen­guins, who though seem unwieldy on land, zip past you with light­en­ing speed within the water, from behind the glass. The view­ing win­dows to see onto the penguin’s island were too high for me to look through, but K man­aged to get some good, clear shots for me to see.

There were count­less types of prim­ate and some unusual anim­als that I’d never seen before like the Tree Kangaroo, but my favour­ite sec­tions were the “Heights Zone” and the “African Zone”. “Heights” was home to the Big Cats such as a very rare Amur Leo­pard, a White Bengal Tiger called Sasha and three Amur Tiger sib­lings. We stayed to watch the Amur Tigers feed­ing at the pub­lic feed times when their keep­ers give talks about their ori­gin and diet.

Appar­ently, these sib­lings were being intro­duced to a new breed­ing pro­gram (Amur tigers are rare, or endangered or some such and they want to breed some in cap­tiv­ity pre­sum­ably, to keep the num­bers up, or some­thing). Their mother was born in the wild, but gave birth to them in cap­tiv­ity, so they’re import­ant as they are a “new blood-line” for the program.

Des­pite their rel­at­ively close con­nec­tions with the wild, when it came to feed­ing time (where the Keep­ers walk into the enclos­ure and hide huge lumps of raw meat for the tigers to find — almost like a game so that their brain­cells don’t com­pletely rot away to noth­ing), the tiger nearest to us (herein referred to as “our tiger”) seemed a tad on the Dolly side.

When the coast was clear, the big cats were released from the shut off sec­tion of the enclos­ure and raced into the main quar­ters. Our tiger poun­ded past and headed straight in the dir­ec­tion of his care­fully obscured lunch. K and I mar­velled at how good their sense of smell must be for the tigers to auto­mat­ic­ally “know” where the food is from the out­set and how their senses must be more acute, what with their mother being wild.

How­ever, instead of tear­ing into the meat, our tiger leapt over the shrub cov­er­ing the goods, turned about-face and stalked the neigh­bour­ing area for the best part of 5 minutes. The other two found their meals almost instant­an­eously and were tuck­ing away hap­pily at their grub, bliss­fully unaware of our tiger. Our tiger con­tin­ued to search and stalk unsuc­cess­fully, each time it would get close to the bur­ied treas­ure, us human spec­tat­ors would almost hold our col­lect­ive breath, will­ing him to dis­cover it before the oth­ers did, so that s/he didn’t go hungry.

No doubt con­fused, our tiger plod­ded over to its sib­ling, as if to ask for a morsel, and got a fierce reproach. Tigers obvi­ously don’t do shar­ing, then.

The crowd that had gathered gave a muted cheer when our tiger finally stumbled upon the bleed­ing obvi­ous and retrieve his much deserved nosh. For a while, I don’t know who looked more stu­pid, K and I, or the tiger!

After­wards, we vis­ited the neigh­bour­ing Ante­lope enclos­ure, where some wild bunny wab­bits had set up home. Iron­ic­ally, it was the cutesy bun­nies that almost over-shadowed the tigers, even for big cat lover, K. As a res­ult, I now have enough blurry long-distance shots of ran­dom rab­bits on my memory card to rival those of the tigers!

The “African Zone” felt sig­ni­fic­antly detached from the rest of the zoo as it had a safari-like sens­ib­il­ity. Rhino, zebra, gir­affe and vari­ous breeds of birds and other wild­life roamed “freely” along­side one another on a dry sandy plain.

Again, we made a point of stay­ing for the allot­ted pub­lic feed­ing times in order to get a close peek and take advant­age of the sub­sequent photo oppor­tun­it­ies of the rhi­nos and gir­affe hav­ing a late after­noon nibble.

One of my favour­ites was K’s cap­ture of a gir­affe at the water hole. You’d think with such prom­in­ently knobbly knees, they would actu­ally be able to bend them some sense, obvi­ously not!

African ele­phants inhab­ited the pad­dock oppos­ite the gir­affes and rhi­nos, and included a little baby, whose name may have been “Opal”, if my memory serves me right. This is the last sea­son where humans are per­mit­ted to feed the ele­phants by hand. Accord­ing to the prin­ted paraphernalia they hand out, research has shown that humans can pass dis­eases onto ele­phants and so the pub­lic feed­ing will be com­ing to an end as of the close of the sum­mer, to pro­tect the health of these large mammals.

Many school chil­dren on a field trip had gathered with much excite­ment to feed the ele­phants. I chose not to feed them (the ele­phants, not the chil­dren) as given my suf­fer­ing in said heat, I didn’t feel like bat­ter­ing excit­able chil­dren out of my path. I did stay to watch the feed though and felt priv­ileged to get close enough to almost reach out and touch them, espe­cially given that it was some­what of a “last chance”.

Most of the day was spent trekking around the zoo’s hugely slop­ing hills, stop­ping inter­mit­tently for our pic­nic lunch that we’d packed and an ice cream or two. Des­pite us the tak­ing the clearly des­ig­nated “Easier Route” intend for those in wheel­chairs and moth­ers with push-chairs and mul­tiple off­spring, K still had her work cut out heav­ing me up steep inclines. There’s no way I could have man­aged on my own.

The zoo is sym­path­etic to the plights of such vis­it­ors and as a res­ult, has a very gen­er­ous con­ces­sion on its tick­ets for dis­abled vis­it­ors and their carers. I recom­mend the zoo to vis­it­ors with dis­ab­il­it­ies, espe­cially in regards to access to dis­abled toi­lets (there was one in every toi­let block — AND they were sep­ar­ated to the baby chan­ging facil­it­ies, which is a wel­come nov­elty). All refresh­ments and food vendors were on level ground also. Just bear in mind the steep hills and take a carer with a good amount of strength and non-slip shoes! I do not recom­mend that wheel­chairs users go without a carer with the idea of self-propelling a manual chair or man­oeuv­ring a motor­ised chair, unless they’re the sort of per­son who find the idea of sky-diving and other adrenalin-rush sports appeal­ing. Hon­estly, even the most exper­i­enced and skilled in wheel­chair hand­ling would find the ter­rain hard-going.

You can see pho­tos taken by K and I dur­ing our day out, here [Ran­dom rab­bit shots excluded]. They are by no means ser­i­ous attempts at the sci­ence that is “Wild­life Pho­to­graphy”, just our efforts at try­ing to cap­ture some of the amaz­ing creatures that we saw dur­ing our visit.