Our first blog

About 20 minutes ago my wife asked me how you set up a blog, and a few minutes later here we are!

Perhaps I should introduce us and supply a little background.... my wife Mandy and I saw the Centre was for sale in February 2006, we visited, fell in love with the animals and location, and by the end of April we had bought it! A bit of a change for an ex-policeman and a wife more used to teaching in a nursery school, but there you go, sometimes you've just got to have a change of scenery (in our case from Surrey to Cornwall via a year on a farm in Dorset).

Some of you may have known the Centre as the Cornwall branch of the Otter Trust. We don't intend to make too many changes, the place has a beautifully peaceful atmosphere that we don't want to lose, but it does need some updating which we have already started, more about that some other time, I'm sure you'd rather hear about our animals.

They range from the secretive (Muntjac Deer), to "in your face" (most of our British Otters but particularly Hilda, Tino and Tamarisk) and include a confused Karulah (a Bengal Eagle Owl) who really should be shy but would much rather come and meet everyone and show herself off.

As well as the British Otters we also provide a home for some of their cousins, the Asian Short Clawed Otter. Our "family" consists of dad Raymond, mum Zephyr, 2 year olds Tilly, Tom and Tiny and little Solo, who until last Sunday was the youngster of the group at 1 year old. What happened last Sunday (the 25th November) you ask??? Well Zephyr, at the grand age of 11 years and 11 months (a very respectable age) produced 4 beautiful, tiny silver furred cubs. We are leaving them as much to themselves as we can at the moment so we don't know what sex the cubs are, but they have grown from the size of my middle finger to 4 fat sausages in just over a week so things are looking well although there is one who is noticably smaller than the rest who we are a little concerned about.

The new arrivals have got us hoping that the weather won't be too cold or wet for too long. That, however, doesn't present any problems for Honey, a 6 month old British Otter, who relishes the cold and the wet. She's been very shy until the last week but has started to approach us at feeding and is learning to come to her name. She has just started to argue with her mum, Harriet, and we reckon the cub eats about 60% of all the food we give the pair, greedy little thing! Poor Harriet!

Well, I'd better go and do some feeding before it gets too late. Bye for now.