Donations – Thank You For Your Support

Paradise Park is a Wildlife Sanctuary in Hayle, Cornwall, and home to the World Parrot Trust and Operation Chough.

PARADISE PARK SUPPORT FUND – Thank you for your support

We are so incredibly grateful for your donations.

You made a huge difference to us getting through the pandemic years, with three periods of closure and the winter months, plus covid restrictions which were a real struggle. It will continue to be a challenge with the crippling energy crisis affecting us all, so not out of the woods, but when the sun shines here in Cornwall it is lovely to see visitors enjoying the Park and to see the JungleBarn full of families when the weather is not so favourable.

We continue to do everything we can to reduce costs where we can, but our monthly bills for animal care at the Park have increased a lot in the last two years. Your support for food and vet bills, staff wages, habitat enrichment, water and electricity and maintaining animal enclosures, either by visiting, financial, dropping off food donations, or via our Amazon Wish List, is still vital to get us through these difficult times.

Our many visitors know that we strive to give the very best care to our animals and at the same time create amazing family memories. Every gift really will make a difference in helping to ensure the high standard of care we pride ourselves on continues every day. We love reading your messages of support and they have given us much needed hope for the future.

Wildlife is under pressure in so many ways and we see this both in our work with native species like the chough and red squirrel, and internationally via the World Parrot Trust with endangered parrot species. The covid pandemic, bird flu and the energy and climate crisis, remind us all to think about our place in this world, and how vital it is to take care of each other, look after wildlife and this irreplaceable planet we call home.

We would like to extend our very best wishes to you all and look forward to seeing you on your visits.

With heartfelt thanks from all of us at Paradise Park xx

Below are the ways you can help support Paradise Park.

RED PANDAS
The main food for a Red Panda is bamboo. There is not much nutritional content in bamboo which is why Red Pandas in the wild will spend around 15 hours a day eating the leaves. Although they have fresh bamboo every day, we also give a high fibre panda cake to make sure they get enough leafy content in their diet. The panda cake comes as a coarse powder which we mix with warm water and roll into cake balls. One sack of ‘panda cake mix’ costs us around £86 and lasts for about two weeks. So, you can see they have quite an expensive diet. They also enjoy vegetables like sweet potatoes, parsnips and carrots which are steamed and small amounts of grapes, apple and pear. Find out more about Red Pandas here.
Weekly cost for Panda Cake Mix = £43
Annual cost for Panda Cake Mix = £2,236
Keeper Donna Sinclair has produced a little video for you at the bottom of this page to explain about Red Panda diets.

PENGUINS
To feed each penguin their favourite fish each week it costs around £10.40 (that’s 266 sprats a week per penguin on average). Overall, this works out at around £11,000 a year for our colony of Humboldt’s Penguins. On top of this, they also have salt tablets and vitamin/mineral tablets called Aquaminivits.
Weekly cost for sprats for one penguin = £10.40
Annual cost of sprats for the colony = £11,000

PARROTS
One of our biggest food expenses at the Park is ‘Kaytee’ a specially formulated balanced pelleted food for parrots, which we soak with diluted cranberry juice. They love this. As we have so many parrots this take up a huge part of our food budget. On top of this they will also have nuts, seeds, fruit and veg.
The Kaytee used to feed all our parrots of one day costs us around £25.
That’s about £750 a month, or £9,000 a year!

CARIBBEAN FLAMINGOS
It costs us around £22 for the 15 kilos of specialist pelleted feed our flamingo flock eat each week. In winter our Flamingos move to a more ‘maintenance’ diet which is lower in protein than their summer breeding diet. The flamingo food is a specialised floating pellet which is a complete diet and includes sea salt, spirulina algae and carotenoids which supports their brilliant colouration. Specialist Feeds
You can watch our new flamingo webcam here and see if you can spot Derek, our Flamingo chick (well not a chick anymore 🙂 throughout the day.

ENRICHMENT
NUTS!
Our parrots eat in excess of 47,000 nuts a year (palm nuts, walnuts, Brazil, pecans, macadamia, hazelnuts, almonds) and on top of this pine nuts. Other peanut lovers are the pheasants, pigeons and cranes. And we can’t forget our nut loving Red Squirrels! The photo above is Herbert a Palm Cockatoo eating a palm nut.

MEDICAL SUPPLIES
Medicine and medical supplies along with veterinary bills are another key cost in running Paradise Park. This photo is of ‘Little Crane’ who was born with curled toes. Special bandages were applied on the chick’s toes to help straighten them out. Many individuals have medicines and special supplements to help keep them in the best possible health.
Examples of costs:
Cost of Calcivet (Liquid calcium and vitamin D3 supplement) for birds = £24.95
Cost of shampoo for the Miniature Donkeys = £17.10
Cost of annual veterinary bills and medicines on average = £22,000

Video from Keeper Donna Sinclair