Turning A Public Park Into a Zoo: An Introduction to Crow Nest Park Zoo

At some point in 2021, I saw my local public park and thought to myself "wouldn't it be cool if it was a zoo?". The ornamental lake with a small island, the mansion, the cafe, the green house, the playing fields, walled garden and many beautifully-manicured pathways could all lend themselves to a very pleasant zoo.

Obviously, I'm not rich and the park is very much in the ownership of the local authority, so I can't make it a physical reality... I can, however, make it a virtual one by using Planet Zoo!

Crow Nest Park

In real life, Crow Nest Park sits in a small town called Dewsbury, which is where I grew up. It was opened by the Victorians in 1893 to bring a feel of the countryside to an area which was otherwise dominated by factories. Most of those factories disappeared over half a century ago and, like most small towns in Northern England, Dewsbury has undergone a steep decline. If I'm honest, it's a bit of a dump nowadays, sadly so, but, like a diamond in the rough, one of the few areas that stands out as still quite nice is the park. It's cared for by hard-working volunteers. Sadly, despite their best efforts, the park hasn't fully escaped decline; both the museum and the cafe next to it closed in recent years as a result of money drying up. All that's left is a green house (which is frequently vandalised), a lake, some monuments and playgrounds. As you might expect, it looks a lot different to how the Victorians made it; there's lots of beautiful buildings and landmarks that simply no longer exist today, having been bulldozed over the years. 

I've had a lot of good childhood memories at the park: collecting conkers with my dad, getting lost in the trees, riding my bike down the slopes and making visits on school trips. Nostalgia has always been a big part of my builds and this project is no different. My aim is to recreate the park to such a degree that I can walk through it on Planet Zoo and evoke some of those memories, all the while enjoying the fantasy of it being a zoo.

Overview

Overview of the half completed zoo (a lot of it needs updating to my current standard)

The lore for this zoo is that it was bought from the local authority at some point in the early 2000s and used by the new owner to house their growing animal collection. It's meant to be a private zoo which has "open days", similar to how some private zoos operate in real life. Buying the park and closing it to the public would cause absolute uproar in real-life as the park is a much-loved free attraction available all year round, but purely for convivence, let's just pretend that doesn't matter!

Like many private collections, it has a focus, that being on the "big and dangerous". That means there's lots of big cats, canines, great apes and megafauna like elephants, rhinos and hippos.

Needless to say, it's the biggest zoo I've ever built. With that comes issues; by the time I've finished one area, the older ones just look outdated and not up to standard. It doesn't help that along the way I've been distracted by other projects leaving me only enough time to work on it for maybe one or two months a year.

One way I've reduced the workload is by making habitats quite basic. That's how they'd be in a real private collection; lots of wood-and-wire cages and simple paddocks. Private collections rarely have expensive state-of-the-art facilities and this zoo will be no different. That's not to say I won't upgrade some later.

The clouded leopard cages - I built this zoo around the time the Southeast Asia Animal Pack came out which goes to show how old it is.

The zoo has some loosely defined zones. The bottom part is mostly tropical species: breeding pairs of clouded leopards, southern cassowaries and jaguars, as well as a non-breeding group of giant otters. The lake with a duck island has been turned into a lake with a siamang island.

Close-up view of one clouded leopard cage.

In the centre, there's a green house which I made into a crocodile house. This is one of the first things I built so it needs an update. Currently, it has a saltwater crocodile and a leucistic American alligator. I had the bulk of my reptile collection in here originally but then I moved it to the nearby park maintenance building. I wanted this zoo to have a hefy reptile collection so I added every exhibit reptile available at the time, plus Galapagos giant tortoises, Cuvier's dwarf caiman and a pair of Komodo dragons.

The Crocodile House, one of the first things I built so needs an update!

The zoo has a lot of woodland on one side so I've used that for woodland species: grizzly bear, timber wolves, Eurasian lynx and cougars. I've also made a breeding complex for polar bears, taking design cues from Yorkshire Wildlife Park.

Then there's the huge playing fields which naturally made the perfect African savannah. I've not built this area yet but I'm planning on having at least giraffes and rhinos, maybe hippos and elephants if there's enough room.

The siamang indoor enclosure, one of the newer additions.

Elsewhere in the zoo you'll eventually find Siberian tigers, chimpanzees, western lowland gorillas, snow leopards and African penguins, plus more inbetween.

As for guest amenities, the cafe is back open and I'm thinking about transforming the mansion into a hotel or a wedding venue (rest assured, the animals won't be used as photography props). The park's playgrounds and leisure areas have been bulldozed to make way for habitats.

If I'm honest, I got a bit carried away with this project. It wasn't meant to be as big as this. I got the "private zoo turned public" idea from Wolds Wildlife Park and originally planned on making it around the same size. It's now unfolding into something around the size of Yorkshire Wildlife Park. I might have to dial it back a bit because, ultimately, I want a zoo I can actually finish and to a good detail, not something that's so big it just never gets done.

One of the two cassowary habitats.

Whatever happens, rest assured that I can see myself working on this zoo for a long time to come. It's still enjoyable to work on, even writing about it now is making me want to work on it, and that's a big motivator. 

For now, I hope you enjoy this write-up and the few screenshots I've shared. I plan on showing the zoo as I complete each zone, so keep an eye out for more regular posts in future.