K is for... Kangaroo!

Okay, so I struggled a bit to come up with a good word for K; with Kangaroo I am stretching it a little bit...

As my exams are now over, I thought it would be a good idea to get as many people together as I could, and do something exciting. There's quite a few cool places to go around here, but I decided what I really wanted to do most of all was to go to Beale Park, because in six years of living here I'd never actually been!

The animals they house are a rather eclectic bunch. Everythings sort of organised along continental lines, so creatures who live on the same continent are often found in the same enclosure. For example, the alpaca are in a field with a bunch of rhea, and most of the small/exotic birds are in aviaries named after continents: e.g. "Australasian" and "Himalayan Region" aviaries.

But it does have some creatures I'd never seen before in a zoo.

Capybara! They are so huge! I mean, I knew they were "biggest rodent" and all,
but they're absolutely massive! And so weird looking.



Coati doing acrobatics on the high ropes. These guys were incredibly cute.



Yellow Mongoose. These guys were incredibly energetic.



Alongside the new, there were also some old favourites. The Red River Hog I have seen before, at London Zoo, but it was very cool to get even closer to one at Beale Park.



I did feel a bit sorry for this guy, though, as he was all on his own.
At least the ones in London Zoo are a small family.





Everybody loves Meerkats.

The Meerkats were cute, as ever. Although several of them seemed to have no tail, which was a little strange.



This guy kept popping up all over the place.

The peacocks were awesome. One male and one, possibly two, females pottering about the park, free to wander wherever they liked. The female we saw had chicks, three of them. She was wandering through the children's play area with them, no concerns at all about danger.

Now, I know what you're all thinking. Where's my kangaroos!!! Well, sadly, kangaroos are not well adapted to lives in captivity, so you don't find them in the zoo. But you do get wallabies!

Beale Park has a large collection of wallabies. They are extremely cute, and while we were there, they were very active (apart from this guy, who was just being lazy).

They also have another, smaller marsupial called a potaroo, which is only about the size of a cat. Until it started moving at speed across its enclosure, I didn't even realise it had kangaroo-like legs! I did try to take a picture, but it didn't come out very well, and then the potaroo hid behind a bush and wouldn't come out.

For more Beale Park photos, you can check out my set on Flickr. I have only uploaded the "good" ones there though. Which sadly means you can't see the photo of Jamie's amazing pig-whispering skills in action. You know how cats love to have their faces scratched, and roll over on their backs so you can do their belly? Yeah, Jamie managed to do that to a massive pig. It was awesome.

Overall, we had a really good time. We were there for about five hours in the end, and it only started raining just as we were leaving. I even managed to get sunburn when we stopped for lunch. One of my friends was very nice and brought a bottle of champagne for me to celebrate finishing my exams with, which was lovely.

We rounded off the day with an evening in the pub, drinking with the same friends who'd come to Beale Park, plus a few extras. Yesterday we even managed to put together a respectable showing for tea and cake in the afternoon. I'm quite enjoying this new found freedom I've got, now the exams are behind me.