I love HWP, it is such a great place. The wife and I did the keeper for a day package on our honeymoon and loved every minute of it. Glad we got to see the cubs when they were small(er).

I was sad the Uri was euthanased along with Mercedes, but they were getting on a bit. Anyway here are a few pics from the day (April 2010)

Feeding Uri



Uri sat by the lake



One of the cubs, because we had been feeding them, they were very "friendly"



Cubs have big teeth too!



Putting all the beef out for the little puddy cats



Watch those fingers



Rewarding Mercedes the polar bear after sucessful target training.



All in all a good day.

Polar Bears look a lot beter surrounded by ice

It's a great place Thornton Saint. We're regular visitors. If you go up again there's now a fantastic cake shop in Kingussie called the Potting Shed that is well worth a visit. They are the same people that have the nursery and cake shop out at Inshraich.



They do, but even wild ones aren't on ice all year round as shown by the Frozen Planets programme.

In Mercedes' case she'd have been dead in 1984 without the intervention of RZSS and the car company so whilst she lived in not ideal conditions at Edinburgh it's better than being dead. The enclosure built for her at HWP is great and that enclosure and her 'roadtesting' of it is going to play a big part in helping in the conservation of Polar Bears in the future.

Quote rover49="rover49"Polar Bears look a lot beter surrounded by ice'" And we don't have any of that in Scotland, close to Aviemore... Mercedes lived a long and fruitful life at both Edinburgh Zoo where she bred cubs and HWP where she had a couple of years of fantastic conditions, anyone who saw her romping through the snow would have seen an animal completely happy with her surroundings. She ended up in the zoo because she had become a pest wandering to town to scavenge for food, more info here www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/support/ ... ppeal.html

Quote rover49="rover49"Polar Bears look a lot beter surrounded by ice'" And we don't have any of that in Scotland, close to Aviemore... Mercedes lived a long and fruitful life at both Edinburgh Zoo where she bred cubs and HWP where she had a couple of years of fantastic conditions, anyone who saw her romping through the snow would have seen an animal completely happy with her surroundings. She ended up in the zoo because she had become a pest wandering to town to scavenge for food, more info here www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/support/ ... ppeal.html

anyone who likes "wildlife" photography should get themselves to Chester Zoo and/or Longleat, I'll try and post some of my pics tomorrow.

And this is when I will concede that, on the day in Longleat I do wish, with all my heart, I had bought the D60 and not the 550, with the lens I hired the shutter speed just wasn't quite fast enought to catch the bird of prey show as well as I'd have liked. Still got some shots I am fairly proud of on a personal level though.

Sounds a bit niche that, probably not for a family web site.

ooops, not a typo I'll live down easily!!!!

Standee is Chester doable in one day in your opinion?

depends when you go, we went in August and it was fairly rammed, as it was warm most of the animals were outside in their enclosures so we didn't get that involved with the queues to go inside the pens/buildings etc, I admit to spending an hour just sat watching the cheetah and her cubs, I think I took over 400 shots in that hour alone.

take an extra SD card and a spare battery

and whatever you do, don't believe the hype about Chester town centre, or the Green Bough hotel!!!

We've 36gb of CF cards and eight batteries mate, I don't call her 4 gig for nothing

lol

I really do recommend Chester Zoo, given her apparent love of big cats, she'll love it.

Longleat was OK, but taking photo's though the window is frustrating (we never, ever, put the windows down when we thought we could get away with it, honest!)