Lincs Pride JULY 228.qxp 10/06/2021 09:39 Page 16
GOING WILD IN LINCOLNSHIRE
GOING WILD in
LINCOLNSHIRE Lincolnshire isn’t just home to its native wildlife species, but to a wealth of creatures, great and small. This month we’ll suggest ways to go wild in Lincolnshire, and here we meet Neil Mumby, owner of the most long-established wildlife park in Lincolnshire to find out how a visit to the 20 year old Woodside Wildlife Park helps him to support national and international efforts to prevent the extinction of endangered species... Words: Rob Davis.
“YOU WANT TO SEE SOMETHING SPECIAL?” asked Neil Mumby in, of all places, the middle of a penguin enclosure. “Always!” was the predictable answer from the journalist with the camera.
“My hobby was falconry. I kept peregrine falcons, golden eagles, hawks and owls, and when I was made redundant just before the millennium, I wanted to turn my hobby into a business.”
Neil lifted up a piece of the enclosure, underneath which a nesting Humboldt penguin mum is cuddling her month-old chick.
“I purchased a derelict farmhouse – Wood Farm – with some tumbledown buildings and a large grass paddock. I opened the business initially on just a few acres under the name Woodside Falconry, just at the start of the Food & Mouth epidemic, on 12th April 2001.”
The fluffy little grey chick is wide-eyed and undoubtedly very lucky to have been brought into the world at Woodside Wildlife Park, five miles east of Lincoln almost equidistant between the city itself and Wragby. The colony of Humboldts are a relatively new addition to the park, having arrived just a couple of year ago, but the park itself is rather more well-established and in fact celebrated its 20th anniversary in April this year. It’s the only BIAZA and EAZAaffiliated wildlife park or zoo in Lincolnshire, and is now home to around 400 animals – great and small. Neil was born and raised in Waddington and Bracebridge, and after studying at Caythorpe Agricultural College, he worked all over the world in the poultry industry, advising on high welfare production environments. “From being a youngster in the late 1960s I had a lifelong interest in birdwatching, falconry, botany and pretty much everything to do with natural history,” says Neil.
The business opened with 15 birds of prey, but Neil realised that to broaden the attraction’s appeal and to ensure it had the footfall necessary to bring revenue into the business, to grow the site and to provide a home for more animals, it would have to diversify. And so, work began on adding a tropical house with butterflies and reptiles. The park would be known as Woodside Wildlife and Falconry Park from 2009, and from 2014 it was renamed Woodside Wildlife Park. A much more profound change than the name, though, was Neil approaching BIAZA, the British & Irish Association of Zoos & Aquariums, and it’s this affiliation that sets Neil’s Woodside Wildlife Park apart from any other, more recently established, wildlife parks which have been created in recent years. Other parks around the county and across the UK are animal sanctuaries. Main: Julia, the park’s 15-year old Sumatran tiger.
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Typically, these are private collections comprising of animals which have been purchased or rehomed from elsewhere and are allowed to open on a few selected days a year or, once they’ve obtained a full zoo license, open fully to visitors all year round. Though Neil is full of respect for the county’s other wildlife parks, Woodside’s affiliation with BIAZA and EAZA (the latter is the European parent body; the European Association of Zoos and Aquariums) means that Neil and the team are part of an international community which is scientifically led and conservation oriented. The network of 100 British member sites (in the case of BIAZA) and 400 European sites gives Woodside access to – and consideration within – a framework of European breeding programmes designed to hold information on the genetic stock of each species and to facilitate breeding programmes. “Joining BIAZA and EAZA enabled us to grow organically and to be part of a community of international animal conservation projects,” says Neil. “In 2012 we became home to Lincolnshire’s only pack of Hudson Bay wolves – our first carnivores – which proved to be a real success. Our lynx followed in 2013, and in 2014 our Sumatran tiger Julia came to live at the park.” >>
