Otters, and Wild Boar, and Moose; Oh My!

Saturday was a simply gorgeous day, sunny and warm.  Dennis and I went for a ride to another nature park in Lelystad, not the huge Oostvaardersplassen I've mentioned before here; although this one was still pretty big, and we saw lots of animals!

While it's not a huge open-plains type nature reserve (there are fences and enclosures to keep the animals in) it is still big enough to wander around for a couple of hours and the animals have very large enclosures.  The first thing you see when you arrive is this "bug palace", the playground area (with a flying fox!) and the information centre and restaurant:

There were lots of frogs making a LOT of noise in the pond, we even saw a couple:

We walked to the otter area first, seeing a big nest for the storks on the way;

These two (below) came up out of the pond and proceeded to have a lovely dust bath in the sun!

One of the storks popped by for a visit as well.  None of the animals seemed at all fazed by the humans, I guess they're used to being looked at and know we can't get in at them. You're even allowed to bring dogs into the park as long as they're on a leash.

It was just lovely walking through the woodland in the dappled sunlight, listening to all the birds as we went looking for more wildlife!

There were absolutely huge fish in this pond, swimming lazily around near the surface.

We could see a herd of deer on the other side of a lake, but they were a bit far away for good photos:

I was just about to record all the frogs and birdsong when this fellow appeared right in front of us!

He'd been for a dip in the pond, and was having a good old scratch against the tree! Again, completely unconcerned by how close we were;

Dennis even got some pretty good footage of it, have a look!

A bit further on we came across some more wild boar, with piglets!

They were so cute! Look at this one also scratching his head on a rock:

And the one in the middle here looking at the camera!

Er, and the one trying to hump another in the background...

Again, completely unconcerned by how close people were.

We also saw some moose:

Some swans;

I liked this giant bird's nest, kids could even get into it!

The restaurant has a deck overlooking the lake, would be just lovely to sit and have a drink there, we are definitely planning to come back and do so!

Our last stop before we went home was to see the Przewalski's horses! Endangered in the wild and originally from Mongolia, I was pretty excited to see some:

Very lovely. There were some areas we didn't get to see, so we will go back sometime soon and see if we can spot some other species of deer, beavers (unlikely) and perhaps some bison.  If you're interested you can read about the nature park here. It's in Dutch but should translate for you.