Bear Wood Fundraiser

Bear Wood Wildlife Conservation Fundraiser Film

The original concept is back in 2008 when we were developing what was the National Wildlife Conservation Park. From that concept very early days, and that's over 11 years ago, to now actually seeing it completed and done, and through that time, even when we were starting the plans and you looked at it and thought, 'Can we really do this in this woodland?' We have. We've achieved it.

It's done now, and it's fantastic. When you're starting plans on paper, when it's been drawn up, it looked good, but it's nothing like walking around it and seeing how impressive it is to walk on this walkway. To build Bear Wood, we did a big fundraising campaign, and we've been very lucky because we have as much money as we needed to make this happen. We got to where we needed to be.

So our sponsors and everybody involved in this has been really important to us. So we've had a huge team of internal people from the zoo, so that's projects team, animal team, maintenance, landscapes, conservation, every team at the zoo. Obviously, the fundraising and development team at the beginning of the project. And then externally, we've had all our external consultants and everybody involved with the build, carpenters, architects, people doing foundations and fencing.

So huge teams of people inside the zoo and out have made this happen. We are all sort of on top of each other at this point, as everyone's trying to finish off and connect everything together, but it has genuinely been approached with quite a good humor by everybody. We turned the power on yesterday. There's lots to do.

It's all just about manageable. The woodland is beautiful, and it has its challenges. So what has made it quite difficult to build is also what makes it really good to be in. So it's been hard to get around, hard to move materials around, and everybody that's worked on it has had their struggles with it, but it's also what makes it really good.

In this environment, as soon as we get a few days of rain, everything turns to an ice rink. So when the weather is good, we can really push on. When the weather is bad, it does cause us some problems. All the materials for the walkway have been carried down the walkway, so all of the big timbers we've got in here, some over six meters long, they've all been carried in by teams.

That has been incredibly challenging for the people building the walkway but also essential to the woodland. We've worked really hard to make the exhibit fit into the landscape here. It's not a situation where we've designed something, and we've come in and built it. We've really worked with what we have here.

So we have gone round trees, and we've relocated walkways, swales or the edges of the exhibits. So it really has been developed on the ground, on site, and that was really important to us. And a lot of that's happened during construction, so we took quite a flexible approach to how we built things. We'd go off in a direction, we'd assess it, and we'd move things accordingly to make sure things fit.

So for us, it was really important to retain what we could in this woodland and take as much care of it as we possibly could. Bear Wood opening is going to be a massive addition to Wild Place. It's an added 45 minutes approximately onto the journey, where you're walking through the British ancient woodland on a raised walkway, and it's a real immersive experience where you're able to look down off the walkway to see all of our new animals. Bear Wood is very different from a lot of the enclosures that we build here at Wild Place or have built in the past.

Usually, our enclosures are associated with our institute conservation work, be that in Madagascar or in Cameroon, and we take you to those countries, and we show you what it's like in those countries and try and immerse you in an African exhibit. Bear Wood's different in that you remain in South Gloucestershire, and actually, we take you back in time. The idea is that we're going to take you back 8,000 years and have a look at what animals lived in this type of habitat at that time. So you go through a journey through time and the effects of deforestation and woodland over that long period of time to current day and what you can do for forests now and woodland in the UK and overseas, and in that, also see the animals that existed there, which we've brought into this unique exhibit to show you the bears, wolverines, lynx, and wolves.

So Bear Wood, this exhibit is split into a number of different paddocks, and that's for some of the different species. Some of the animals here are living together, and some of them are living separately. It's an exciting way to see them, but it's also actually quite an enriching way to see them. By bringing animals together that would naturally live together in the wild, it gives them those same interactions and problem-solving and stuff like that that they would have to do as wild animals.

It's beneficial for them, and it's a really exciting thing for guests to see. This woodland that we've built this exhibit in is really quite perfect. It's identical to their natural habitat. We've sourced them from all over Europe and even further afield, even all the way from Siberia, one of our wolverines is coming from.

We've got four different transports of animals. The first ones that arrive are two bears. They're going to be coming in really quite soon. Get them back together because they are brother and sister, so they do know each other.

And then in the following day, we'll let them out and start to explore the enclosure. I think people, when it's open, will be blown away by the work, effort that has gone into this project, how you'll be walking up through the trees, seeing the bears roaming around as they would have done hundreds of years ago in their natural environment. I remember standing in the woods a year and a half ago, and standing on the path with the trees above us and saying, 'Oh, this is where the walkway's gonna be, but it's gonna be about four or five meters above our heads.' And now we're actually on that walkway, and it's just really amazing how just seeing everything has come to life, and we're seeing the views now.

We couldn't envisage what that was gonna look like. And now we're walking through the woods, and we can see where woodpeckers have drilled their holes into the trees and where a tree creeper has made its nest, and we're actually at eye level with all that stuff, which is just amazing and just really exciting. So this is what it was like 8,000 years ago. These are the animals that lived in these woods at that time.

So we're giving you that experience of taking you backwards in time, showing you the effects of what's happened to woodland over those years, and where it is now at the current day and what you can do to help woodland as well. So as guests enter Bear Wood, they will enter a time chamber which will transport them back in time to how the British ancient woodland used to look many, many years ago, and that's when they will enter Bear Wood and meet all of our amazing animals. So most people get the chance to walk through the woods down at ground level. But what we're doing here is something quite different because we're allowing people to walk through at canopy level, and they're going to see a lot more.

It's going to be really special views. They're going to be able to see the whole of the animals' enclosures, and they'll see features within those enclosures that they wouldn't normally see from ground level. It's giving us capacity really to do things that we've not been able to do here before. We teach about 6,000 schoolchildren every year, all the way through from early years to post 16, and even some university students come in here from time to time.

And all our sessions really are outdoors, so having an indoor space will be brilliant. So along the way, there'll be lots of interpretive exhibits or elements where people will be able to use these interactives to find out more about what's in the woodland. So they could be sticking their hands into an old tree stump and finding out what animals live in a dead oak, for instance. It's not going to be just a series of scientific information.

We want to really pull out the most interesting things about the animals and plants. Rangers, as well as being able to answer questions on some of the animals we have living here, the bears and the wolves, for example, and help people find them if they're finding them a little tricky to spot, we'll be there to show them just how amazing the wildlife we have living around the site is. The birds in the canopy, the bugs in the floor, all these amazing, complex parts of nature which you might miss if you didn't have a little helping hand to point it out to you. With the natural world, we're so inspired by what we see happening globally.

We can watch big documentaries of stuff in Africa and Asia and all the rest of it, and that's where we think wildlife is, it's far away, and we don't realize it's right here on our own doorstep as well. By having the bears and the wolves, the animals we used to have in our woodlands, that just shows what we have left to lose, and it also shows how incredible our nature once was but also just how incredible our nature still is. Wild Place is evolving and growing, and we're going to have more visitors coming all the time to see these wonderful animals and these exhibits, and it's just a culmination of lots and lots of hard work by a great team here at Wild Place. To see bears back in the UK and back in an exhibit like this, unique, there's not one like this anywhere else.

Built in British ancient woodland and showing off animals back in the habitat that they used to be existing thousands of years ago, really worth coming to see. I'm super excited for Bear Wood to open. It's personally my favorite aspect of Wild Place so far, and I'm really excited to share it with our guests. It's been the best project I've ever worked on, and I think it may be the best project I ever get to work on.

So I have been really pleased to be doing it. I'm really excited for it to be finished, and I'm going to miss it terribly when it's done as well. There's nothing about this build and this project that I've not enjoyed. It really is a world-class exhibit.

I can't wait now to share it with people when we open.

Bear Wood Fundraiser

Here we are at the entrance of our ancient woodlands, one of the richest UK habitats. These have been here for generations, taking hundreds of years to establish. And they're home to hundreds of species. In fact, this is home to more threatened species in the UK than any other habitat.

And yet over thousands of years, we've lost most of it. 95% of the original forest cover of the UK has been lost. So we need to act, and we need to act now. Bristol Zoological Society hosts nine and a half hectares of this amazing habitat.

We're already studying it, and restoring it, and protecting it. But we'd like to share it with our already 200,000 visitors, and with this amazing exhibit, it's going to be many more than that. We want to inspire those people and enable them to make a positive contribution to the future of woodlands in the UK. So we want to create Bear Wood.

This is about bringing back the creatures that used to live in these woods thousands of years ago. Certainly bears, but also wolves, and lynx, and the lesser-known wolverine. When you enter this exhibit, we're going to take you through a time machine and whiz you back 8,000 years. You'll find yourself on a walkway, wandering through sometimes the tree canopy, sometimes closer to the floor, and we'll take you through the changes that have happened over time.

But we want to take those changes in a positive way into the future, to restore the future of woodlands in the UK, to help all our visitors to be part of that positive change. So join us and find out a little bit more now about this unique and exciting project. We have a fantastic team of staff and amazing volunteers who are working together to actually do research and survey all our species within our site. Now, what we do here is we link it in to local biodiversity actions plans as well, such as South Gloucestershire.

I think what's a very exciting thing about Bear Wood is not only inspiring the public, being able to tell the people what we're doing, what species we have, which animals walked down those pathways the night before by clever things like camera traps and mammal tunnels, and lots of exciting different little pitfall traps that we're putting in so that we can look at the invertebrates over time. Really educating those young people, the little people that come through the door, getting them excited so that they can say, actually, Mum, I want to go out and preserve a bit of woodland. I want to be a guardian and I want to keep those habitats so that my grandchildren can be inspired too. So this is where we're going to build Bear Wood.

The entire exhibit is about 30,000 square metres or 7.5 acres, and the walkway is about 706 metres long and will snake through the exhibit. We want to lessen the impact of what we're doing here with our walkways and fence lines. So we've done a lot of work to make sure that they move between our existing landscape features, our trees and our swales, and our specialist pile foundations which means that we won't damage the root systems.

Bear Wood will provide a fantastic opportunity to bring groups to Wildplace Project that wouldn't normally have the opportunity to come here. That would include groups from deprived in urban areas, black and ethnic minority groups, young carers, and young people who may be struggling in a formal learning environment. There will be jumps through time where you leave behind a particular species that has gone extinct. At a moment in time, due to human activity, deforestation, habitat loss, all those issues that we're still facing today.

And as you move along the walkway, you'll move forwards in time until you come back up to the present day as you exit the woods. Some of the interactive play elements that we're looking to introduce are things like bird's nest that children can climb up into, or a badger's sett that they can go down under the ground and see what life is like for a badger. It's about trying to connect them with the wildlife and what life is like in the woods, so that when they leave the woods, they'll be excited and inspired to actually take action for wildlife. It's like a big, big natural playground.

I'm excited about seeing bears, wolverines and lynx because I've never seen them before in the wild. I can't wait to see these animals because I see them a lot, like camera and video, but I've never seen them, like, in real life because they aren't really in this country. Bear Wood will encourage a young and old to help protect and look after the wildlife we all love. Bear Wood will tell nature's own amazing story.

What we have here is really precious. So please support us and be part of something truly special. Help us build that...