The area that is now Regent’s Park once belonged to the monks of Barking Abbey until Henry VIII dissolved the monastery and turned it into a hunting park. In 1835 it became a public park on the instructions of the future King George IV who at the time was the Prince Regent (ruling in place of his mentally ill father George III until his death in 1820 when he became George IV). That’s why the park is The Regent’s Park, but hardly anyone ever calls it that.
Lotherton is an Edwardian house and country estate with gardens, extensive grounds, a deer park and a small zoo. When I first visited back in 2013 you couldn’t take photos inside the house and Wildlife World was originally a bird garden. Much has changed since then however and I’m splitting these posts into the zoo, the house, the chapel and the gardens, starting with our first destination of the zoo. There is still more of a concentration on birds here than on the animals they’ve since acquired and one of my favourites was this lovely Edward’s pheasant, named after a former director of the Natural History Museum in Paris.
The jay has become a regular visitor to our garden over the last month – even appearing on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. He seems particularly fond of the peanuts I regularly leave out for the squirrel.
Last week I chanced to look out into our garden and saw this wonderful jay. I was taken a bit by surprise as we’ve never had one in the garden before but it was lovely to see it hopping around the trees and even taking a big chunk out of the fat balls!
Stonebridge City Farm has been a lovely place to visit during all sorts of iterations of lockdown in England. They’ve lost a lot of money having to keep opening and then closing again so if you could donate a little something here that would be great. My last visit pre-Christmas was to see their new calf – Orion – as well as some of the other photogenic residents.
Over the gloriously sunny Early May Bank Holiday weekend I paid a trip to Stonebridge City Farm to see the lambs, but they also had some young calves and a seriously inquisitive cockerel.
We only found out the Cotswold Wildlife Park was near where we were staying the day before we went, and we were very glad we did. The website advised to plan to take at least four hours to go around the 160 acres of parkland and we actually spent well over five hours there and even then we didn’t see everything.
Capybara
The deer at Wollaton Hall are currently rutting so I thought that would be a good opportunity to take some photographs (being mindful not to get too close, of course!) Below are some of the photos I captured of the stags, plus geese and swans around the lake.
Africa Alive! is a wildlife park in Suffolk; purchased in 1991 it is part of the Zoological Society of East Anglia, along with its sister organisation Banham Zoo. They have around 1,000 species from Africa over 100 acres of parkland and we ended up spending the entire day there, finding much to explore from animals we were familiar with to those we were decidedly not.
Fossa
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