Georgie's Bank Holiday

What a bank holiday treat today was!! Beautiful weather that all our animals relished with delight and a packed out car park which meant lots of lovely smiley visitors!!

One of the most scary parts of my job are when friends or family come to the zoo to see the animals and of course to see me in action!  Today some lovely friends were visiting from the 'big island', and would you believe my boss (of my other job) with his family came too.  No pressure then!!

How satisfying it is when they see another side of me. Don't get me wrong -  everyone knows that I adore my job at the zoo, but they don't really see why until they are standing in front of me,  excitedly relaying stories about the tigers, lions and many animals that we look after!

It was a wonderful day, topped off with the lovely Indian tigress Lola and her public feed at 4.30pm, where she was given a paddling pool to play with. As you can see from my photo, it was quickly punctured by her 3 inch canine teeth while she dragged it around her enclosure with glee!!

We always welcome 'gifts' for our animals from the public, we are on a tight budget, rebuilding enclosures as we can and money is always tight.  So if we have any generous supporters out there that may have hessian sacks, natural rope, plastic paddling pools(!) branches, wooden pallets, beer barrels, big tyres, half bottles of old perfume etc etc knocking around a shed or garage not being used...... Send it or bring it to us, where we will make use of it as a toy, enrichment or useful bit of furniture for an animal enclosure!!

It would be lovely to see you at the zoo this summer, I'm here every Monday!!

Georgie's Blog

What a gorgeous day to be working outside at the zoo today!

We were lovely and busy with a mixture of families, couples and groups of friends visiting today, many of whom were interested in our work and asked lots of questions.

The only small problem that I had was that our male lion Charlie Brown had decided to have a lay in. No amount of cajoling could get him up for the 11am Lion Talk, and there he stayed until 3pm then roared all afternoon to announce his readiness for the day!

His friend Nahla however came over for a brush, something we try to do for all of our cats that like a bit of a tickle, we can't put our fingers through the mesh for obvious reasons but can brush them through the wire with a washing up brush!

The black lemur, Antaly was hopping about her branches with her gorgeous little 4 week old baby clinging on to her tummy a lot today, to the pleasure of our smaller visitors.

One of the two conservation projects that the zoo supports is the Madagascar Fauna Group (MFG) - a great organisation and one of the few still working in Madagascar at the moment due to the dangerous political unrest. All 100 odd species of lemur in Madagascar are threatened, mainly due to loss of forest habitat.

Madagascar is a poor country and the locals need to farm the land in order to eat. The MFG , amongst other things, are teaching locals sustainable farming methods such as planting crops in between the trees.  We are very proud to be supporting them.

Come and visit us if you are here on holiday or if you live here. We would love to see you and you'll be helping tigers and lemurs to survive in their natural habitats too! I'm here every Monday!!

 

Georgie's Day

I used to think that conservationists were 'hippy type treehuggers'- meant in the nicest way of course.  BUT that is not true, anyone can be a conservationist from babies to great grandparents that visit our zoo for the day.  Hopefully our enthusiam and passion for what we do is infectious and makes for a magical and interesting day for our visitors too.

We send some of the money you pay to come in to see our cats, primates and smaller animals out to fund two projects very dear to our hearts and I am going to tell you about one of those today.

In Kudremukh, located in the Western Ghats of India, we fund (amongst many things) - a fabulous educational programme for the local people to help them safely live alongside one of the largest big cat predators in the world... the Indian tiger.

In the past this project has helped stop 30 tigers from being poached in one year.  Who would have thought that a tiny zoo on the Isle of Wight could be responsible for preventing horrible deaths to as much as 1% of the WORLD wild tiger population?!

So there you are, not only can you laugh at the monkeys’ antics, ‘oooh’ at the lions and jaguars and stroke a wallaby

, but when you walk across our threshold you are unwittingly becoming conservationists!

Look at you smiling!  You should be, you are helping us save TIGERS!!!

If you have visited the zoo and want to help us a little bit more please post comments and your photos on social media sites - Facebook, Twitter, Trip Advisor: more visitors means more money to send out to our projects, and better enriched lives for our cats in our zoo!!

Thank you for reading this,  I'm here every Monday!!