Kids go FREE in March

Every Saturday and Sunday in March Kids go FREE at DZP!

Yes, as long as they're accompanied by at least one full paying adult and you consider a no-obligation donation to our Monkey Mayhem fundraiser kids go free every weekend in March.

So - bring your little monkeys to help out our little monkeys!

Boxing Day Photos

I did create a lovely slideshow for this but have experienced the usual technical problems with blogger! Anyway, as you can see our animals enjoyed their festive enrichment.

Boxing Day Bash!

Boxing Day is always a hightlight of the DZP calender. For those of you yet to visit on 26th December, the day is full of festive fun for our animals. We always receive lots of positive comments from our visitors who enjoy watching the animals' experience of Christmas. Well, this year is no exception and we have an exciting programme of events for the day.


11.00 The vervet monkeys have their Christmas party with crackers and presents

12.00 The bears enjoy their Christmas Dinner

2.00 The lions open their stockings
Followed by the tigers unwrapping their Christmas presents

2.45 A chance to meet and greet our reindeer: Donna, Comet and Blitzen

3.15 The otters recieve their Christmas gifts

With the exception of the reindeer meet and greet, each activity will be accompanied by a talk from a member of our education department. We hope you will be able to come and join us.

Monkey Mayhem

Here at Dartmoor Zoo our current Vervet Monkey enclosure is long overdue a major overhaul. The current enclosure is one of the oldest in the zoo and although the monkeys have plenty to do we would like to upgrade it and give them a larger home. Modern zoo standards have many more guidelines that zoo's have to adhere to these days. In order to comply we have proposed a new site just around the corner of their current enclosure, opposite the wolves. There is currently an empty enclosure in its place which will be removed and the new monkey enclosure will incorporate the whole wooded area. This will provide our troop with a much larger area to play, including three fully mature trees and a vast amount of natural enrichment for them.

In order to do this the keepers and education department are organising a fund raising week during the half term from Saturday 24th October - Sunday 1st November, this will include:

• Cake sales, on an animal theme



• Animal fancy dress



• Face painting



• Catch the monkey



• Monkey quiz treasure hunt and trails



• Raffles with great prizes



• Monkey guy competitions for school
  and much more!

We have put next to our current monkey enclosure a board with some information about our proposed design and also a collection box as we need to raise at least £4500! Any donation, however small is gladly accepted and we hope you are able to visit us during Monkey Mayhem Week.

Fire hose fun for Sovereign

Thanks to another large donation of fire hose from the fire brigade this week, the keepers have been very busy creating a variety of enrichment devices. Fire hose is used by lots of zoos, it is incredably durable and therefore safe to use with even the most destructive of our animals.

Sovereign, our ten year old male jaguar, was one of the first to benefit from the delivery. We decided to make a sling for a large boomer ball and to hang this up from a tree in his enclosure. Boomer balls are a firm favourite with the carnivores but by suspending one up high, the type of movement possible would obviously be very different. It was made so that peices of meat could be wedged between the straps and the ball, making food acquisition much more of a challenge! After a week or two, the object will be removed and hung in one of our other cat enclosures for a short time so that Sovereign doesn't become bored with it. The scent of other felines on the ball as it is rotated around the enclosures can only add interest.

Fire hose was also randomly woven between the other trees in the jaguar enclosure and loose ends left hanging down. We hope Sovereign will perhaps bat and pull on these, and we can also suspend food from them.

Our curator Will has made this browse holder and we will be making more in the near future. These will be given to many species including the vervet monkeys, coati, tapir and reindeer. We have plenty of other ideas for the fire hose including a hammock for the bears.

Monkey Business

The keepers and myself have been busy over the last few days sprucing up our monkey enclosure. We have a troop of 4 Vervet monkeys here at the zoo; Jay who is our only male and is in charge of the group and the females; Kiki, Kala and Ayanna.

Vervet monkeys being a common species throughout Eastern and Southern Africa are not regularly seen in zoos in England. They are a medium sized monkey with the males getting up to about 7.5 kg and females about 5.5 kg. Throughout Africa they are regularly seen as pests due to their inquisitive nature with often leads them into trouble. Vervets are a terrestrial species of monkey, spending a lot of time on the ground foraging for food. Their diet in the wild as well as at the zoo is mainly made up of fruit. In the wild they will also eat small rodents, insects, a variety of leaves and have even been know to destroy crops. At the zoo along with the fruit they get chicks, the occasional invertebrate as well as a specialized monkey concentrate food.

We have planted lots of different plants and small trees to give the Vervets a more natural looking enclosure, all the logs and substrate have been replaced, a new rope bridge is in place as well as new enrichment items added to keep the little guys active.

The enclosure they are currently in is now looking a bit dated and is not a favorite with the keepers. The management at the zoo are aware of this problem and with input from the keepers are coming up with plans to build our monkeys a brand new enclosure with a bigger house, loads more ground space as well as fully grown trees to climb around in. Until this is built though, the keepers will constantly be rearranging, adding and taking away items and enriching the lives of our monkeys to the best of their abilities.