Beauval Zoo

Zoo’s. What is your opinion on them? For many years I have avoided them as I’m concerned about caging wild animals, but they do so much good work and I have started to visit them. This zoo reckons to be the biggest in Europe with over 800 species of animals. It is huge. They suggest you need 2 days to look around it so we paid for the two day ticket, which was very expensive. It took us the full 2 days to look around, I felt you could easily have spent 3 days here. The enclosures are well set out, occasionally you think the animals have a small cage for the size of that animal and then you realise that the cage goes over that hill, under that walkway or whatever. There was lots to see, I could have spent hours watching some of the animals like the Rhino rubbing it’s neck on a stone. The feeding of the gorillas and how they each took their bottle from a set seat except one who was playing the keeper up, and the way the alpha male waited until everyone was fed before he went for his drink. The keeper was walking on the roof of the cage, pouring the drink into each gorilla’s mouth from above. At the close of day, it was fascinating watching the Savannah animals waiting to go into the cages, each going in by species, except one ostrich who was so excited and jumped the queue going in with the giraffes. We went to a sea lion show that was interesting to watch. Before the show starts they come and select the sea lions to perform, all of them seemed to want to be picked. It very much reminded me of dogs in agility classes, the sea lions seemed to be having fun. The second day we went to the bird flying show.. It started off as you would sort of expect, a snowy owl flying from one side of the field to a perch, then another owl, the another, until about 5 owls of various types flying from one perch to another. Then the hawks came out. Then the massive vultures. We were sitting next to a “station” were the men were calling the birds, and then throwing them back into the air, it was constant, not stop. Then a slow bit, a roller and two that I don’t know. Next it was the turn of a multitude of birds , kites and others that I also don’t know. And then finally , so many birds; scarlet ibis, parrot, macaws, pelicans, the list goes on. This was absolutely stunning, how they train these birds I do not know. We really had no choice to to return to see the afternoon show, and I’d love to go again. Apart from the two shows we look at the various aviaries and glass houses, which are so big, so many things. It might have been expensive but well worth it. We stayed in the car park for two nights, it’s busy, I had to reverse park into a very narrow spot. No services are provided so you have to go with full tanks, they do provide toilets which is good because we would struggle to make our toilet last 2 days, although we have done so in the past. The parking is free so that offsets the price of the tickets. We can’t go away without van issues, this time as I got out of the shower I noticed that the kitchen had rather a lot of water sloshing around the floor. A little investigation showed water seeping out of the pump. We left it and went to the zoo, there are times and places for DIY. In the evening I tightened some screws and the pump now has the typical Tracey’s plumbing tool under it, a dry piece of kitchen roll. I really don’t want to start changing the pump, although it would justify why I have carried a spare pump for the last 5 years. Also the fridge isn’t working properly on gas again so we probably need to do some work on cleaning the flue.