ZOO NIGHTS

A review by Tanya Howard

Have you ever wondered what the animal kingdom gets up to after hours? Well you can now find out at the Zoo Nights events on every Friday until 26th July from 6pm until 10pm, but only if you are over the age of 18.

Last Friday I attended the opening night of the six week long event and got a chance to see the Zoo as I’ve never seen it before. Thanks to the limited amount of tickets there is more chance of seeing the animals during the out of hours timing.

First things first make sure you read over the map that is given out upon entry as it states all the times of the activities happening throughout the night. We made the mistake of casually strolling around before actually taking a proper look so we missed out on a lot of fun sounding events.

There are a number of live talks throughout the evening, including Giraffe Supper Time, Owl Meet and Greet, Tiger Time and Live At Penguin Beach with Feed, which we did manage to catch. The penguin’s were so cute and when the feeding time was over we stayed as the crowd cleared out to watch them swimming around.

There are workshops throughout the zoo and we got the chance to make out own penguin figures out of plasticine, and I found out that my friend used to eat it at school as a child lol. There are also two guided tours; You’ll Never See A Moon-Walking Emu, which talks you through fascinating animal facts, and The Birds And The Bees, which unravels the mysteries of reproductions in the animal kingdom.

A new addition to the zoo this year is Plonk Crazy Golf, a 9-hole course which we made a point of going to and I managed to get a hole in one on what I was told by staff was a difficult hole. But my friend Ameera was like a lunatic and whacked the ball off the course most times and just made up her own rules in the end, safe to say I definitely won.

When you get hungry head to the World Food Market in the middle of the zoo and grab yourself a snack from an array of street food vendors. They have something for everyone including waffles, burgers, vegetarian dishes, or our favourites the macaroni cheese stand and the hot dog stand.

The other option is to get yourself to the Magnum ice cream stand where they are giving away a limited number of free ice creams each night. They have two new flavours, Cookies & Cream and Vegan Chocolate, and I’d definitely recommend giving them a try.

If I was to go again I would definitely pay more attention to the times as I would have love to have seen the meerkats and lemurs but they go to bed at 9pm which is when we went over. I also would have loved to have heard The Birds And The Bees talk as I’m sure it would have been really interesting but there was only three sessions of this and I missed them too.

I have heard a lot of negativity about the Zoo Nights events but I felt that the zoo made sure to keep the animals safe. There was plenty of staff and security working and canvassing the zoo and areas are closed off when the animals go to bed so that they have silence. The Gorilla Kingdom is closed all evening so the babies can sleep and the live acoustic sessions end at 9pm when the exhibits close.