Twycross Zoo

Last week, my university cheerleading squad and I visited Twycross Zoo as part of our Cheer Week celebrations which is basically a week of fun things to celebrate the end of exams, done together as a squad.

Now I love zoos. When I was little, I was definitely one of those kids whose face was pressed up against the glass, trying to get that little bit closer to the animals inside the pens. I'd run excitedly from pen to pen, fascinated by all the creatures with their colourful fur or camouflaged scales . I wish I could say I've grown up a little, but that simply wouldn't be true. Needless to say, I was very excited when we arrived at the zoo...

Twycross had pretty much all the animals you could wish for (except big cats- we only found a cheetah and a snow leopard which were beautiful, but weren't quiet as exciting as maybe lions or tigers), and, maybe slightly oddly, an absolute abundance of monkeys. Seriously, they had more monkeys than I think I've ever seen before. All different shapes and sizes, from the apes and orangutans to tiny little monkeys that chattered excitedly amongst themselves! The zoo's banana budget must be through the roof!

The penguins were hilarious, placing them second in my 'top three animals' ranking. (The elephants came in third (the baby one was adorable!) and the flamingos came in first. Mainly because what could be better than giant pink birds?!) They came right up to the edge of their enclosure and pottered around, craning their little necks to see the people crowed around them. I later realised this was because they were anticipating the arrival of a large bucket of fish, which was fed to them as part of the penguin parade. Here, the smart little birds waddled out of their enclosure to eagerly snap up the fish being thrown to them, while the zoo keeper told us about them and the effect of our pollution on their environment.

But for me, the flamingos stole the show. There was a large pond full of them, each ruffling their bright pink plumage and shaking their tail feathers, determined to outdo each other. Personally, I found them mesmerising- I could have watched them all day!

However, before long, it was time to go. So with one last wave to the monkeys (and with my inner-child sulking at being dragged away) we headed home.