A day at Dartmoor Zoo

On our recent holiday we had a slightly chilly day at Dartmoor Zoo in Sparkwell not far from Plymouth. It's the zoo that the film We Bought a Zoo is based on, although in the film the zoo is in California, not Devon.

On the way in we saw the tapirs eating their breakfast.

Tapirs are some of my favourite animals. Unfortunately the chilly wind deterred them from staying outside and once they had polished off their meal they went and hid in their little house.

The tapir's neighbours, the capybara family were also a bit chilly but were happier to stay outside.

Although it's quite a small zoo (which makes it really manageable and good for young children or older people), Dartmoor Zoo has an impressive array of big cats. It feels like visitors can get quite close to them and the design of the enclosures makes it easy to take photos. 

Of couse, it also means the cats can have a look at you!

I learned the difference between big cats and lesser cats from the talk by the cheetah enclosure. Big cats roar, and lesser cats purr, but no cats do both. Cheetahs are some of the largest of the lesser cats and we heard them purring in anticipation when the zookeepers brought out their food. Because they are lesser cats, they have kittens not cubs. 

Just across from the cheetahs they have lions and tigers. The tiger was putting on a show, doing adorable tigerish things like grooming.

But at one point he yawned revealing a set of fangs that could rip a human's throat out and it was a reminder that these creatures are deceptively fluffy.

The reptile house was small but well laid out and the lizards were visible. The geckos were fun. I told the volunteer staff member working in there about how my family used to have geckos living in the house when we lived in the Gambia. (They were very useful, eating flies and bugs. Even my grandma liked having them around and she wasn't keen on critters.)

There were a few smaller animals as well. Some were hard to photograph, like the potoroos. They are small marsupials that look like a cross between a big rat and a small wallaby. There were also some meerkats, which seem to be mandatory at zoos now. I found them amusing, particularly as it looked like one of the keepers had left a welly behind and the meerkat was colonising it in the name of meerkat-kind.

The following evening we watched the film of We Bought a Zoo. There was one bit which was a dead giveaway that the story was based on a tourist attraction in the UK - just before the zoo is about to open the weather turns into nonstop rain potentially preventing anyone from attending on opening day. That felt much more likely to have happened in Devon than in California!