BWC Baby Boom

At the British Wildlife Centre, near Lingfield, this year’s cute youngsters are now on view and charming all the visitors. The spring brought plenty of red squirrels kittens, with healthy litters produced in the Centre’s walk-through red squirrel enclosure. For such a beautiful and increasingly rare native species, this is excellent news.

Gorgeous red deer calves and fallow deer fawns born in June can now be seen on the deer park, and keep an eye out for the small muntjac deer fawn in The Copse, who was just a few hours old when visitors first saw him.

Super-mum polecat ‘Mags’ has produced a litter of eight very cute and adventurous kits, now bursting out of their den to explore and proving to be quite a handful! And in May, sharp-eyed visitors spotted water vole babies on the pond with a second litter appearing in June. Conservation is at the heart of the Centre’s aims and in autumn a few of these young polecats and water voles will be released at suitable sites in the UK, giving a much needed boost to numbers in the wild.

NEW FOR 2014: The Centre is now displaying all seven British owl species in their brand new aviaries. Individual sections have been landscaped to represent the different wild habitats in which each owl species can typically be found. So if you want to meet Hedgwig the snowy owl, Fawkes the short-eared owl and many more then take a trip to the British Wildlife Centre; open every weekend and during state school holidays. Summer holiday opening: Thursday 24 July to Tuesday 2 September 2014.