Tropical Wings World of Wildlife

Visited 12th September 2006--------Entry £5.80

Report by Shimmer

Click on each picture to see full size photo

"Tropical Wings World of Wildlife" in South Woodham Ferrers started out as a butteryfly house, and has now expanded to a mini-zoo with a decent sized site to walk around. Whilst it can't compete with any of the large zoos around the country, it has realises this fact and presents itself as a fun place to visit for a few hours rather than a day out for the family.

The first attraction is the butterfly house, which is good to walk around, not as many different tupes of tropical butterflies as I've seen in other houses, but those that they did have were pretty, and cages around the outside holding various animals such as the marvellous water dragon pictures above.

We attendeda slightly disappointing talk about "Bugs and stuff" in which we learnt that the park doesnt have any tropical spiders because the person in charge of bugs section is afraid of them. The stick insects were pretty impressive but the minipedes and coakroaches were the same old stuff I've seen before. Outside we watched the meercats prancing around for a while and envied the easy life the Bennetts wallabies have (when not being chased by poorly-minded children). There was a hunting bird display, which was passed on, having seen similiar several times before.

Our favourite attraction had to be the Asian short-clawed otters, they have only been there for two weeks and were still uncertain about people. We were lucky though as they ventured near the front of their area during feeding, so we were able to take some good photos. We rounded the day off by visting the in-house restaurant, which served decent food at a reasonable price, very different from the big-name attactions around the country *coughs* Tussards *cough*