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{Outdoor Play Linky: Wildlife Park}


Join our weekly Friday Outdoor Play linky below and share your own ideas for getting your kids playing outdoors!


Visiting the Wildlife Park


We took the little peas to the Shubenacadie Provincial Wildlife Park today. The wildlife park takes in injured animals with the goal of rehabilitation and hopefully rerelease to the wild, as well as animals born into captivity in zoos or as pets, that are no longer wanted. It includes mainly animals that are native to Canada, though there are a few 'foreign' animals too.

Despite many visits to world-class zoos in the past, the girls were fascinated by the up-close nature of this small wildlife park, and most of these species were animals that they had never seen in zoos before, such as skunks, raccoons, and rabbits. They see these animals plenty in story books and hear stories of the 'trouble' they cause around people's homes and gardens, but have had very little real-life contact with them. So these 'basic' animals were actually the biggest attractions for them!

Some of the other animals we saw there were:

Wild Turkeys

I must admit, despite their reputations for being ugly (and admittedly they don't have the cutest faces), their feathers were just beautiful!



Reindeer / Caribou



Peacocks

There were lots of these wandering around! I kept my eyes peeled for a stray tail feather on the ground, but alas, there were none to be found! I did find a lovely goose (?) feather and two colourful peacock feathers from the back of the peacock.



Rabbits

Again, there were lots of these just hopping around freely.



Arctic Wolves



Grey Wolves



Black Bears

These definitely did not look like any wild black bears we've seen before! They were obviously very well-fed!



Baby Blue Jays

There was a whole family of these hopping around near the enclosures. Sweet Pea loved these!




Thanks to everyone who linked up to last week's Outdoor Play linky! We had almost 30 posts linked up last week, including lots of new participants, and so many wonderful ideas were shared!


Be sure to check out these posts that were linked up last week, if you haven't already:


Jenny at Let the Children Play shared some wonderful links to inspiring imaginative play areas for outdoors. Ever since we started looking at buying a house, I'm slightly obsessed with imagining how I can set up outdoor play spaces in our future garden! And Jenny has loads of great ideas!



New blogger Sarah at Life in the Unknown linked up the brilliant city nature scavenger hunt they did. I love the idea of looking and listening for signs of nature right in the middle of the city! (A perfect activity for us.)



Moving Smart shared a fantastic article about why kids need to play outdoors. I love this blog, it's my new favourite read!



And finally, I had to share this idea for making DIY fairy toadstools for your garden from Sunhats and Wellie Boots. My girls have been playing a lot lately with some fairy figurines I picked up on sale at Michael's a couple of weeks ago. I have plans to make them a special home to play in when we get back from our holidays.




How did your kids play outdoors this week?

Share your ideas for outdoor play activities with us! Here’s just a few guidelines for sharing.

> Any kind of children's outdoor play is welcome. If it happened outside, then please link it up!

> Please do not share any competitions, promotions, or posts that are not related to Outdoor Play.

> Please remember to link back to this post and help us spread the word about the importance (and fun!) of outdoor play!

> Each week we will feature an activity from the previous week. By contributing you are giving permission for an image and link to your post to be republished. 


By the way, if you're not familiar with blog link-ups, here is a handy blog hop / linky party info page from Pre-K Pages to get you started.