Spent a lovely day at Cotswold Wildlife Park today with my children and parents. We've been a great many times over the years and it never fails to impress me, the gardens are beautifully kept and most of the animals seem to thrive. Needless to say I took lots of photographs, it was a great opportunity to put my new Tamron 70-300mm lens through its paces!

Here are some of the highlights! First up are the King Vultures, which to me look just like cartoon caricatures! Apparently the white-eyed ones are female - those eyes look like they've been painted on!

King Vulture

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As always the Meerkats did not disappoint, what fantastic little creatures!

Meerkat Young Meerkat 20140410-20140410-_DSC5661 20140410-20140410-_DSC5662

The Otters are always high on my list of favourite animals to see, sometimes they are very elusive but today they put on a cracking show, it was almost as if they were posing for the camera! I only wish the Otters on Mull were as cooperative, we spend days at a time trying to spot them up there!

Otter Posing!

We were delighted to discover that one of the Ring-tailed Lemurs in the Madagascar enclosure had given birth to two babies just 24 hours prior to our visit! Very cute!

Ring-Tailed Lemur The babies were born the previous day... the mother does look somewhat jaded here! General consensus seems to be that she actually looks a little like Rowan Atkinson! :)

Next up, the wonderful Giraffes! 

Peekaboo!

We were really lucky with lots of the animals today, they played to the camera beautifully! The Peacocks were no exception. I had never seen a White Peacock in full 'show off' mode before, it was a real bonus to have these two putting on such a performance for us!

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I had lots of fun with the camera today, delighted with the new lens and looking forward to lots more photo opportunities in the coming weeks! 

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Finally - possibly the hardest animals to tame in the whole place!....

Henry! 20140410-20140410-_DSC6064