GOING WILD: All creatures great and small supported at Highland Wildlife Park

Summer is always an amazing time to visit Highland Wildlife Park with the long, sunny days, native plant species in full bloom and the pitter patter of tiny paws and claws as many of our animals reach the end of their breeding season.

This year we are extremely happy to announce another particularly successful breeding season across the park with visitors able to see everything from our young elk twins to four new Japanese macaques!

Our Japanese macaques have welcomed four babies to the troop: Pete, Pikachu and two yet-to-be-named little ones.

Japanese macaques are carried on their mother’s stomach for the first four weeks and are then carried on her back, sometimes for over a year.

Infants will eat their first solid food at five-to-six weeks old and by seven weeks old can forage for food independently from their mothers.

The park isn’t just home to large species though, we also saw successful breeding seasons this year for our tiny invertebrates!

In 2023, we raised over 3,500 dark bordered moth eggs in our off-show breeding facility at Highland Wildlife Park, which is fantastic news for the species and has allowed RZSS to continue with our programme of conservation releases for this species.

Earlier this year we participated in the first ever release of threatened dark bordered beauty moth eggs. 750 eggs were released in February into a specially selected site in the Cairngorms National Park as part of the Rare Invertebrates in the Cairngorms (RIC) partnership work.

This was followed by another 750 eggs into the same site in May. Since then, we have also released 979 caterpillars and we’ll be doing some moth trapping in July and August to check on how they’ve got on.

Easier to spot than our dark bordered beauty moths are our Eurasian elk twins, Finch and Pipit born in May.

Our female elk, Ash, moved to the park in January 2022 and welcomed twins, Wren and Goose, last year too.

It is great to see how well Ash and Raven have been bonding and we are so happy they have been able to welcome two more beautiful calves to the park.

Working to reverse species decline is crucial as we face a global biodiversity crisis.

Thanks to our partners and support from funders and other conservation champions, we can make a difference for these often-overlooked species.

It is great to see such a wide variety of species bringing new life to the park this summer. If you want to see these young animals up close and learn about the vital conservation work our charity carries out throughout the year, please do visit us at Highland Wildlife Park through the holidays.

Darren McGarry is the RZSS’ Head of Living Collections

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