Przewalski's Foal.

We celebrated the Queen’s birthday with a visit to the Highland Wildlife Park, an annex to the Edinburgh Zoo; it also just happened to be our wedding anniversary – someone, on hearing how long we’d been married, rather unkindly, I thought, said that Mrs TD had gone up in their estimation. It was also my birthday, though I have now reached an age where I would rather not think about such things.

The HWP would not be to everybody’s taste with there not being a large number of exhibits and several of the more exciting ones were hiding. The place is divided into two sections, one consisting of smaller enclosures with keepers going around giving talks at the same time as feeding the animals. Here, the favourite was the beaver enclosure where the keeper, of three years standing, said that she had never seen either of the animals. But, that was nothing, another keeper with twice that experience hadn’t seen them either. The talks were all very interesting, we heard four altogether, three of which were about endangered species; I could relate a lot of what was said with my knowledge of attempts to conserve the black bee.

The rest of the place was like a safari park and we were able to drive through and see the large herd animals at close quarters though they were all striking by their small stature. The Przewalski's horse is too small to fit our definition of a horse and so I would call a pony, and the bison in the extra also seems small though I thought that the one that stood for several minutes staring at us was somewhat intimidating. I was struck by the ponies’ strong necks and stiff manes, but didn’t manage a decent picture to illustrate the point. I also have difficulty understanding why this species is classed as the only “wild” horse when the three species of zebra are excluded from this category. After wasting some time (nearly an hour) researching the matter, it seems to depend entirely on definition of the word "horse" with most dictionaries excluding Przewalski's on the basis that it isn’t domesticated. I blame it all on the pub quiz culture.