Hob-nob with too many exotic waterfowl in semi-industrial conditions (Slimbridge Wildfowl & Wetlands Centre)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Slimbridge Wildfowl & Wetlands Centre
Date:	20/08/09 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to find off M5 and A38; kids seem to like it

Disadvantages: See accompanying review

Slimbridge Wildfowl & Wetlands Centre is run by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the charitable bird / nature conservation charity set up by Sir Peter Scott in the late 1940s. Slimbridge in Gloucestershire is the Trust's original / flagship reserve, though there are at the time of writing, eight other WWT reserves up and down the country (excluding Scotland). In addition to Slimbridge other WWT reserves I have been to myself are The London Wetlands centre (in London) and Martin Mere in Lancashire, and bearing in mind that I have personally visited only a relatively small sample of WWT sites, I would say that they all seem to be largely alike.

What they are is great big dirty bird zoos, effectively. The birds - mostly waterfowl such as ducks, geese and swans - are sort-of free-range, in that many types are able to get in and out of their (muddy) lake-containing enclosures, to mingle with visitors on the tar-mac-surfaced paths that run through the viewing areas. (You do a sort of a waterbirds of the world tour, following these tracks through the reserves.) The birds on site are also sort of habituated to people, so if you don't care to be mobbed by hordes and hordes of tame Nenes (a famous and rather beautiful type of endangered goose rescued from extinction in Hawaii by the WWT) during your day out, WWT reserves are unlikely to be the kind of place for you. Why the WWT waterfowl would wish to mingle with human visitors is a simple enough matter: you can buy paper bags of waterfowl food at the reserve visitor centres - most people who visit do - and the ducks & geese etc. are used to being regularly fed.

What goes in has to come out and yes, the paths of WWT reserves are generally awash in bird excrement. We are not talking about discreet little dabs of inoffensive black-and-white-stuff, unfortunately; most waterfowl are plant-eaters; combine this with the high-fibre grain diet they're all on at the WWT and the end result is they generate surprisingly large piles of semi-digested waste. Given the high bird stocking densities at WWT reserves there tends to be a heck of a lot of it about; hence WWT reserves are not places to visit when you're wearing your good shoes, of if it's a wet day because the stuff gets - I mean REALLY - everywhere. When our sprog was about two and a bit and walking but still needing to be carried on longer jaunts, we went to Slimbridge one spring but all came back coated in goose faeces from off the soles of her feet when we picked her up to carry her - and this was not just poop from common or garden British geese; it was goose shit from exotic types of bird from all the four corners of the earth, and lord alone knows what kinds of bizarre aquatic transferrable-to-human endo-parasites they were all carrying. Unless all the pet wildfowl at WWT reserves are hopped up to the gills on super-strong anti-helminthics, I cannot, for the life of me, understand how theses places get through their health-and-safety evaluations for opening to the public.

Add to that the fox and in particular rat problems these types of 'reserves' obviously have - if you take more than a cursory look at the waterfowl enclosures, you'll see the rat holes just above the waterline, and poison traps lining the banks of the artificial mud-brown lakes that are all the captive birds have to paddle in (the rats are attracted by all that spilt grain, not to mention the bird eggs). And consider the Slimbridge flamingo breeding aviary - I'm not at all a religious person, but if I was, the unholy stench and sight of those dismal mud-puddles that flamingos breed in, all crammed together in that dark, dilapidated, over-heated shed - well, that would be pretty close to what - if I was a religious person - my mental image of hell would be like, actually. So is Slimbridge a nice place to go for a day out? Personally I don't think so, although living fairly locally, every so often we run out of better things to do, forget how awful it was the last time and go for another visit. (Having lived in the area for a while, I've realized it takes a surprisingly regular approx six to nine months each time for us to forget about the last visit).

To get in it's £8-odd per adult and just under a fiver for sprogs, which I suppose is about average for an attraction in the south-west. The indoor art exhibitions are quite nice, there is an all-right kids' educational area downstairs, and it has an all-right shop and theoretically all-right - but far too small for the extremely high visitor numbers, and very expensive on-site restaurant. If you do visit Slimbridge, the problem unfortunately is that at some point you're going to have to go outside and wade through all those ghastly tame birds.

They were building - ie digging the ditches for - this much-vaunted canoe-ride paddling trip 'excursion' on the Slimbridge site the last time I visited; I understand this has now opened to the public. Watch out for leptospirosis, which is a rather nasty disease most affected people catch from contact with contaminated water that has had infected rats swimming (weeing) in it, is all I can say.

There are extensive areas of 'natural wildfowl environment' on the Slimbridge site - it is on the floodplain of the River Severn, after all - but most of these are (probably quite rightly) closed to visitors and though there are several hides, to see anything really interesting you'll have to visit the reserve in winter when presumably the on-site bird-shit-slurry problem gets even worse with the wet weather. If you're keen on seeing 'real' - by which I mean 'wild' - waterfowl I would say that there are far better places locally in which you could do this.

They may well be doing important conservation work for wetland areas at home and abroad, the WWT; but I don't know, I'm not sure raising money by exhibiting far too many birds in these hell-hole conditions is the best way to go about it.

Summary: Go feed tame ducks in the more salubrious conditions of your local boating pond, I'd suggest