Manor House Wildlife Park: Wallaby fun!

Rating: ★★★★★

We've all visited countless zoos in our lifetime and it's safe to say the majority of the time you feel the animals do not have large enough enclosures or you are left wishing you could be more intimate with the animals.
Sound familiar? Well you should visit Manor House Wildlife Park!

Manor House Wildlife Park, Tenby, West Wales, is owned by TV star Anna Ryder Richardson and her husband. You may have seen the park featured on TV in its own programme, Anna's Welsh Zoo.

Having recently visited the wildlife park myself, I can tell you I have never felt so sure that the animals are happy. Each enclosure gives the animals enough space to roam instead of being cooped up in small cages like most places. However, do not expect to see the wide range of animals that you would in a typical zoo. Wildlife parks are known to be smaller because they focus more on breeding and conservation, Manor House state on their website, 'Manor House is a conservation-led wildlife park. We take animal welfare very seriously, we house and protect a range of endangered animals.'
They do a load of great work to ensure all these endagered species do not go extinct, so why not visit the park and support their work?


What makes this wildlife park so special is not just the amount of animal walk-throughs featured, but how close you can actually get to the animals. In the majority of places, the animals are usually scared of the public and run away or hide, but here that is not the case. The best example of this is the Wallaby Walkthrough, which is my personal favourite.

The Wallaby Walkthrough is a large woodland enclosure with a path for the public to follow and has tree stumps/logs for you to sit on where the wallabies will come up to you. You can feed the wallabies yourself if you buy food from the reception. If I remember rightly it costs £1 for a handful of food, but because my boyfriend and myself visited on a cold winter's day we were one of the only few visitors, so the lady at reception very generously gave us more food, free of charge, to ensure the wallabies got enough for that day.

The Wallabies were hungry for more

The Wallabies get as close as they can and are not afraid, even if you stroke them.
We loved it so much we went into the wallaby walkthrough for a second time at the end of our visit and were lucky enough to see a zookeeper bring their food in with the wallabies bouncing around, following his every move. It's not something you see every day.

Me feeding a wallaby

The African Village

The Lemur Walkthrough is also a big hit. Understandably they do have a keeper inside this enclosure with you to ensure the animals' safety, yet the lemurs do still get closer than usual, even coming onto the path where you are. The walkthrough then leads to the African village where you can interact with Cameroon sheep, Pygmy goats, chickens and see the giant tortoise. This is a fun one, especially for children, as the sheep and goats can be very cheeky.

Although the main features of Manor House Wildlife Park is its walkthroughs, it does house a wider range of animals from rhinos, to zebras, to monkeys. For a full list of the animals and any other information you can visit their website www.annaswelshzoo.co.uk

So if you live in Wales or are thinking of visiting in the near future then make sure you stop in at Manor House, because it is a fantastic place and does a lot of great work. It is suitable for all ages and would make a great family day out with many features for children to play.

 

To see the park and how close you can get to the animals for yourself watch this youtube video, courtesy of dave4077th

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