Testimonies


		It all began on a cloudless, endless-blue-sky evening in 2007... Starring: Jay (in red), Gina (sister) and Kim (unseen hero husband, rolling the camera as the miracle unfolded above our very heads)... It was a beautiful warm summer's evening. The aroma of woodsmoke filled the air and the birds sang in chorus as the three of us sat on the patio up the garden of our mountain home. We were eating yummy freshly-barbecued food, drinking a delicious bottle of chilled champagne, and awaiting the arrival of the glorious Full Moon. We were preparing to do my favourite Full Moon ceremony, to honour the beautiful energy of Grandmother Moon and to honour our Mother Earth. It is a good time to send out your hearts desires, wish/prayers and affrmations and intentions on this day, so we set about this task with some jollity! It's fun to write down your wishlist - feels like Christmas and the anticipation of sending your letter to Santa Claus! We used lots of coloured paper, glitter, glue, felt tipped pens and crayons and had a whale of a time writing down as graphically as possible all our intentions. We then sat back and read them out to one another... Gina's affirmations were personal as she'd been through a traumatic emotional period and needed guidance. I wrote all my wishes and prayers for the success of my new website, Whitefeather Mountain, and affirmed that it would help lots of people in a big way. Kim merely asked for a BIG SIGN that he was on the right path, life and career-wise (he wished to change career after many years in the same job)... then each of us put our wishlists on the bonfire to be sent to Source on the sacred smoke... As the last bit of paper went onto the fire, Gina looked up at the sky and there, IMMEDIATELY ABOVE US... well, see for yourselves! Who says prayers aren't answered?
	My very own WHITE FEATHER CLOUD MIRACLE...
Here's where you get to feedback your comments to me...

Star Guest

Anna Grace

Services and Events

Introducing...

Testimonials

Jay's Page

Home

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow – if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed for fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide from it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy – mine, or your own, if you can dance with wildness, and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful – be realistic – to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself, if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul, if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty everyday, and if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure – yours and mine – and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes”.

It doesn’t interest me to know how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me to know who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

Amazing Animals of Banham Zoo – A Fly on the Wall

By Anna Richards

It’s not everyday you see a Meerkat foraging in the sands of the Kalahari Desert, is it? Nor do you see a clever kookaburra working out how to kill a deadly poisonous snake so that he can eat it. How close would you dare yourself to get to a real live skunk? Well, if you’ve ever visited one of our Amazing Animals shows these things may already be fondly familiar to you!

From the surface, visitors would be forgiven for thinking that the two hours of clean-cut, well-oiled and enchanting bird and animal shows they see is a good days work done for the Animal Training and Presentation Department. Of course, this image of calm, cool ease and well-trained animals is one we intend to project as part of the magic of animal presentation (of course!). The reality is that behind the curtain, the AT&P department is a buzzing hive of activity. Months of training and continual, daily maintenance go into each and every creature in our care, to bring the visitor a delightful array of educational and entertaining talks to build both a keen understanding and a proud sense of respect for the natural world we live in.

The Amazing Animals show began over 4 years ago, and has been growing in popularity ever since. Now with more exotic animals than ever and increasing visitor numbers to our theatre, we are proud to delve you a little deeper into the workings of this very special section of Banham Zoo.

The two Amazing Animal shows take place alongside the two ever-popular Bird of Prey displays. Just as much hard work and dedication go into the Birds of Prey and also require an enormous amount of creativity, dedication and upkeep. 45 individual creatures are housed on our department alone. Each has it’s own talk, show routine, diet plan and enclosure requirements, and it is imperative that these are maintained and re-Assessed every single day of the year. A further collection of fascinating animals also reside at this corner of the zoo, the six motley characters that make up the training and presentations team…let me introduce you!

Andy Hallsworth is the captain of the ship! He oversees his delegates with an experienced, encouraging eye and occasionally buys biscuits for tea-break! Emily Hammell is his clear-thinking right hand girl (and is the tidiest person I’ve ever had the fortune to meet!). Making up the rest of the team is Lizzy Hagger, ‘little’ Anna Forrester, James Bradbury, and myself Anna Richards (and for the record, NOT ‘big’ Anna!).

A typical day

At 8am, bright eyed and bushy tailed, the team arrive to begin the magic! All are greeted by a loud HOO-OOOT from Hooch our European Eagle Owl as we walk through the gate! A quick check and good morning to all of our sleepy creatures and it’s all hands to the cleaning – an inescapable part of any zoo job! Every single animal and bird enclosure on our section will be scrubbed, raked, hosed, mopped, re-bedded and tidied by 10 O’clock. This also happens to be the daily fitness regime for the team (apparently, cleaning burns up to 300 calories per hour – useful!).

Every morning all of the birds are weighed (in good old pounds and ounces!). With these weights we can monitor the birds health, behaviour and ultimately determine which birds will be best to fly for us today. The birds sit quite contentedly on the scales, they all know this routine as well as we do, and always watch us with quiet curiosity. I imagine they’re wondering about us strange creatures and our weird morning habits! Feathers, feet and general well-being are checked thoroughly and then it’s back outside to sit in the sunshine for the rest of the day. It’s a pampered life for these creatures!

Inside, ominous chopping noises echo from the kitchen. A careful base diet of fruit, vegetables and meat are being prepared to give our animals a nutritious, varied and enriching bowl-full every day. I’ve concluded that the animals eat far better than we do!

The Amazing Animal room is cosy and warm, and thoughtfully designed for its inhabitants! In here lives the Armadillo, who destroys his enclosure nightly with his tenacious digging, which has to be re-modelled regularly! His roommates are Flower the skunk, Stitch and Dory the Meerkats, and Sparky the Kinkajou (who’s undoubtedly asleep at this time of morning!) If they’re particularly lucky, all will occasionally delight in a spot of breakfast as we clean their enclosures!

A regular programme of ‘enrichment’ also ensures our animals are never bored in their enclosures. Fruit frozen in ice blocks and favourite treats scattered and hidden around the enclosures are usually enough to keep them very busy indeed. The armadillo chases a basketball around his enclosure for hours. Simple pleasures!

The Shows

At show time, the doors are rolled open and the music welcomes people into the theatre that lies beyond the Heritage stables. People usually enter with either excitement or curious trepidation. We greet them at the door and reassure them with a grin that there will no tigers in the display, and in reply quite often hear “…yes but will there be any spiders?!” Meanwhile backstage things are hotting up as the team prepares the animals for the half hour to come. An important part of this routine often involves making sure the sleepy Kinkajou is awake!

A recently introduced idea to our shows has been working extraordinarily well – the ‘pre-show routine’. Milo the Armadillo and Tallulah the African Grey Hornbill usually play this first starring role – appearing onstage to gasps of surprise, foraging for bits of pre-hidden food (and usually completely oblivious to the theatre-full of people watching them!) before making their way back off again – all on their own premise!

A host of incredible creatures fill the 30 minutes with their displays of natural behaviour. Amongst these is the slender-tailed meerkat, who watches out over the audience for eagles and hawks before running off to the safety of her burrow, the kinkajou, who laps up honey with her 12 inch tongue and Peanuts the blue and gold macaw, who often outwits the presenter in pursuit of a peanut and never fails to bring laughs to the Audience with his cheeky and colourful character. Of course, as much as we like the animals to work off their instinctive behaviour, all of these routines require a helping hand and training to bring them to life.

Training the animals

Routines are constantly being shaped and formed and a rich variety of training techniques ensure the best results and contented animals. Quite simply, positive reinforcement is the basis for all of the work we do, rewarding desired behaviour as it occurs. Most of our training is based heavily around this, and the rewards will almost always involve food!

The most intensive and exciting moments happen when we have youngsters to train. For example, Lofty the young Barn Owl is a new addition to our team, and Andy has been introducing a new technique called buzzer training. The wild Barn Owl has incredible hearing ability and will predominantly use this to hunt voles hidden in long grass. In our bid to keep our display behaviours as natural as possible, Lofty will ‘hunt’ a buzzer hidden somewhere in the outdoor arena just by using his sonar-like hearing. The buzzer is effectively our ‘vole’ (I know voles don’t buzz…but bear with me!) Ultimately, once he has recognised the sound and associated it with food, he will have no problem finding it when we start hiding it. This has been going extremely well, as evident in the morning training session. Andy holds the buzzer behind his glove and Lofty promptly homes in on the sound. A slight hover above Andy before he pounces aaand BASH…Andy yelps as Lofty overshoots the glove and ‘kills’ the buzzer in his hand! Obviously, we didn’t anticipate him being quite SO accurate. Clever bird!

Three new baby rats are also being put through their paces on the stage, practising a new routine. Lizzy puts them all on their specially designed ramp and one by one they scamper over the top of the stage, down a 10ft rope, where at the bottom they leap over to a table, down a branch and then finally 20ft across the open stage and off through a hatch to a box full of scrumptious seed! These clever animals haves learnt this routine in a very short space of time and have even surprised us at how easily they remember it. Quite obviously, they are ready for the big time, and it is decided to put them into the live show.

Hand rearing is sometimes an essential part of training. Introducing an animal to the human world from a very early age means that they are completely at ease when working in a busy human environment, and usually the best way to do this is to take the animals home every evening whilst they are still very young. This way, the sights, sounds and the smells of the human world become a ‘natural’ and everyday occurrence for them, giving them a good head start for their future showbiz lifestyle! Equally, this allows us to get very well acquainted with the animals and their habits. Some of these are not quite as desirable as we’d like! For instance, quite recently we discovered just how destructive the skunk could be when she tunnelled her way into the back of Lizzie’s sofa!

At the end of the day

We feel enormously proud to be able to share these awesome encounters with the public of Banham Zoo. We are constantly reminded of how lucky we all are to do what we do. As anyone in the zoo would agree, a passion for the animals in our care gives the job a unique type of satisfaction. We are particularly privileged, as hands-on interaction with our animals is an important requirement and the habits and behaviours we want to bring out of the animals would be hard to reach without it. All of our animals need to be happy and comfortable in the human world where encounters are close, and toddlers are loud! Even if, occasionally, this does mean having a baby skunk in our living room!

How to keep an idiot happy for hours... hee hee