Today, we are back at Kirkleatham Owl Centre, giving you a behind the scenes tour. Read about the birds, watch their progress in training, and get up close and personal with other residents, including the meerkat and porcupine families. This week the centre is getting ready to reopen
Like so many places, here at Kirkleatham Owl Centre we have of course been closed during lockdown, right up until now, in fact once we reopen next week we will have been closed almost four months to the day.
It has, of course, been a very difficult time with very little – in fact almost no income – but getting ready to reopen has also been more difficult than we first thought.
When we first started planning on our reopening we wrongly assumed that with us being a manly outdoors attraction there would not be that much we would need to put in place, but then we started thinking about it and the list got longer and longer.
Some of the volunteers at the centre
How do we keep people socially distanced? How do we make sure they sanitize their hands? How do we stop people touching things? How do we manage numbers? The list is endless, and it is also amazing how these phrases, such as “socially distancing” have become part of our day to day language so quickly.
But after a lot of hard work and planning we have a plan. There will be a cap on the number of visitors allowed in the centre at any one time, extra hand sanitizers around the centre, one group at a time in our entrance building and we will be asking people “to keep a aviary length apart from other groups”.
Enjoy the outdoor space at Kirkleatham
Social distancing also means we will not be able to have our usual programme of activities in place for the school summer holidays – it just won’t be possible to keep people distanced if we do talks and animal encounters so, for now, they won’t take place.
We will be able to put on our flying displays because where we fly our birds for the public, people can space out around the flying lawn.
One of the centre's resident vultures
Usually we have one flying display a day, but with no talks we are aiming for two – one in the morning and one in the afternoon, so now we just need to get the flying team of birds ready – they have had four months off and we haven’t told them they are on double flying duties.
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