Birdworld hasn’t ruffled any feathers in its latest review, achieving a glowing report and retaining its zoo licence.

The UK’s largest bird park has spent the last few months working tirelessly to enhance its facilities, animal habitats, and visitor experience, culminating in a thorough zoo licence inspection by local authority-appointed experts.

We caught up with Polly Bramham, Living Collections Manager at Birdworld, to talk us through this important process and explain why having a clean zoo licence is essential for the longevity and success of Birdworld.

Can you tell us more about what the zoo licence is and how a zoo/park can achieve it?

Any zoo or wildlife park in the UK that displays wild animals to the public for more than seven days a year must have a zoo licence. There are over 300 licensed zoos in the UK, from small one-acre collections to vast safari parks.

The licence is issued by local authorities and comes with strict requirements focused on animal welfare, conservation, and education. These standards have developed significantly since the Zoo Licensing Act was introduced in 1981, and every department within a zoo plays a part in meeting them. The aim is to ensure zoos keep improving, offering excellent care for animals, engaging and educational experiences for visitors, and meaningful contributions to conservation and research.

How do you prepare for the inspection, and what specific areas did you need to enhance beforehand?

Life in a zoo is never quiet and priorities shift with the seasons. Breeding season means pairing animals and preparing nests; in winter, the quieter days are used for maintenance and staff training; and in summer, the focus is on enrichment, like delivering leafy browse to parrots.

A zoo licence inspection is a chance to give the park a full “spring clean” and make sure everything is at its best. It also means ensuring every protocol, record, and system is fully up to date, with evidence ready to hand. Nothing can be left in someone’s head or “saved for later” – everything must be documented.

How does having a zoo licence help to ensure the high standards of animal welfare and conservation?

The zoo licence requires a set level of commitment to conservation, with larger parks expected to contribute more funding and staff time. This support must benefit a mix of local, national, and international projects, ensuring zoos remain active in a wide range of conservation work.

Did you have any feedback that you were proud of?

The inspectors were so impressed by the record-keeping system that they said it was the best they had come across, even compared to the big zoos with departments devoted to this. Good records are input by the zookeepers daily, with detailed observations and notes on animal behaviours and husbandry, along with a host of other points.

This mass of information is then proofread, sorted, and transferred to the global database to be made available to other zoos around the world for research purposes and general knowledge. Birdworld’s records platform was designed in-house and is very user-friendly, encouraging a vast amount of detail and diversity of information, including photos and spreadsheets.

How significant is this milestone for Birdworld, particularly during such a pivotal time of redevelopment?

There is a lot of focus on the future of Birdworld and the wonderful facilities we look forward to having in the coming years. Inspections are a good grounder as they require us to be in the present, make the most of our current situation, and not live on promises. This ensures we maintain standards to the best of our abilities and don’t sit on our laurels while we wait for what’s to come.

How challenging was it to maintain – and even raise – standards while undergoing such major site changes?

This was not as much of a challenge as might be imagined. Zoos are never a finished product – we are always looking forward to the next project, the next upgrade, the next advancement in infrastructure. With significant changes upcoming, this in-between time is critical for testing out ideas and experimenting with what works for the animals and what engages our visitors. All these things can help inform long-term projects.

What steps did you take behind the scenes to ensure that the quality of animal care, guest experience, and conservation work remained consistent during the transition?

The good thing about being a zoo is that the animals today cannot wait for you to get things right tomorrow. Every day we deal with the here and now and provide the best we can. Tomorrow, we do it all again.

As the park develops, the changes to the teams and the birds are incremental, buffering the animals from an uncertain environment. For our guests, the changes are more dramatic. Birdworld has removed a few tired and old-fashioned facets over recent years. It’s exciting to now be at the stage of revealing upgrades and offering a more accessible and engaging park.

To keep the park focused, Birdworld has worked methodically on revisiting existing exhibits and upgrading them one at a time. This has involved creating mini projects that can be discussed, planned for, and then implemented over a period of weeks before moving on to the next one. Regular guests can see the works in action and the benefits. New visitors can see that Birdworld is actively working on areas that suggest it’s worth returning to see completed.

Thanks Polly, with a keeper team like ours, we feel confident that our Birds are in the very best hands.

To learn more about what we get up to behind the scenes at Birdworld, please visit: https://birdworld.co.uk/learn-conservation/