Dewsbury Zoo Update: Britain's Lost Woodland (May)

 

Here's today's update from Dewsbury Zoo (formerly known as Crow Nest Park Zoo), my project to turn my local public park into a zoo.

As mentioned in the last update, the aim of the last few weeks has been to complete the woodland-themed area, known as Britain's Lost Woodland. I've been working on this area for a while now and I'm very happy to report that I was able to finally complete it and to a much grander scale than I originally planned.

For some context, this is a complete rebuild of an area I finished around four years ago. As you'd imagine, it was really outdated and, honestly, I wasn't very happy with it so I gave it the bulldozer treatment.

In real-life, there's an area of Crow Nest Park that is basically a mass of untamed trees and bushes and the only thing notable about it is that it has a shortcut to the sports field. I wanted to give it more of a purpose in my zoo, so I used it to house woodland species.

The area of the real Crow Nest Park that I've transformed into a woodland-themed area of the zoo.

The old version of this area had more of an "international flavour", with polar bears and cougars, but I decided to make the new version focused on the living and extinct species of Great Britain. This means that, whilst there's the classic European badgers and the recently reintroduced European bison, there's also locally extinct wolves, brown bears, lynx and wolverines. I got the idea from Bristol Zoo Project's Bear Wood but I'm sure there's a similar theme at some other zoos.

All those animals relied on our woodland and disappeared when it was lost, so I thought it was important to focus on the history behind that. Since I'm trying to get this project done quickly, I decided to keep things basic and tell that story purely through signage.

One of the signs I made giving some basic history of Britain's woodland.

Since this is just an update post, I won't show too much of what I've built as I want to save that for the full tour, but I'll show some of the highlights.

One of the highlights is the Badger House where you can see into a badger sett, although sadly, due to hit box limitations, the animals can't actually use it. They do of course have an outdoor area where you can see the whole clan.

In the Badger House, you can look into an artificial sett. Through the power of Photoshop, I added a badger to show how it would look in use!

Another highlight is the wolf habitat which I built on a wooded hillside with a darkened observatory to Uget a clearer, more immersive view of the animals.

A view of the wolf habitat with the observation cabin in the far right.

There's also a large bear habitat which I tried to make immersive by giving it a sunken/invisible barrier.

Part of the bear habitat

Since this area is on an incline, I thought it was wise to build a little refreshment area, complete with a woodland-themed playground.

The small refreshment area which I built to look unopened. I'll detail it when I finish the rest of the zoo as I want to preserve my piece count.

As mentioned, I want to save the rest for the full tour so for now, I hope you enjoy these screenshots.

Next up is the Africa section which is by far the largest area of the park!

An overview of what's been completed, with the park fitting seamlessly with a real satellite image of the park.