Linconshire Wildlife Park Annual Report

MESSAGE FROM OUR CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER This has got to be by far the strangest annual report CEO message I have ever written, why? Well it feels like I’m writing a chapter from a fiction book. First of all it’s not a single year it’s actually a message for two years, and secondly, some of the events within don’t actually feel real now. So here goes The period started in mayhem as we were recovering from the worst floods the area has ever suffered and the park in particular felt the brunt of it, this meant for the first time ever we had to close our doors in the summer period in order to make the site safe and also attempt in vain to relocate thousands of gallons of water, the parrots had to stay high on their perches, animals were moved on to concrete pads which were located a little higher than the sodden ground and we all mucked in with buckets, pumps and hoses strewn everywhere. It took approximately ten days but eventually we were dry and ready to receive customers again.

We are very fortunate that our amazing new development the Animal Rehabilitation Reception Centre (ARRC) was fully complete and operational giving us many options to cater for any of the birds or small animals that needed that little bit of extra care.

Work began on a number of projects including a new enclosure for our ageing lemurs, a sensory enclosure for Nigel our puma who’s eyesight is deteriorating slowly and a new parrot enclosure that we aptly titled the Cathedral Aviary due to its unique design, this will provide new facilities for the mixed Amazon Parrots and also create further space for the growing number of psychologically damaged cockatoos.

The year ended with the arrival of Pascha and Uganda, a truly spectacular pair of 9-year-old white lions (brothers) who needed long-term sanctuary. Sadly the pair were very institutionalised with a lot of mental health problems and had suffered some facial trauma.

Christmas was therefore all things lion as I personally spent an awful amount of my time with these two in order to settle them in. 2020 began with rumours on the international news of a virus that was spreading around China, something named Covid-19. Naturally this was of little concern to all of us in the UK as we’d heard these kinds of scare-mongering rumours many times over the past 30 or 40 years.

Little did we know this one was real.