David Twamley's Animal World

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David Twamley's Animal World

A page for those interested in the survival of endangered species and zoos around the world.

This page is for David Twamley to share his extensive love and knowledge of endangered animal species and indigenous wildlife.

08/05/2026

💯🎁🎈🎉Happy 100th birthday Sir David Attenborough!!!🎉🎈🎁💯

I’ve been a lifelong fan of this true legend of natural history ever since my family received a series of David Attenborough DVDs from the Daily Mail when I was 5. Since then, I have regularly watched Sir David’s documentaries to marvel at the full diversity of life on this planet, enjoying such iconic series as Life on Earth, Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Seven Worlds One Planet, and many many more. I will never grow tired of watching his natural history films and the conservation messages in many of his programmes are truly inspiring.

Tonight, I will be sitting down to watch the special ‘Attenborough at 100’ programme that will be filmed live at the Royal Albert Hall in London to mark the naturalist’s centenary. It will be on BBC One at 20:30, so I hope many of you reading this post will be able to watch it as well.

Happy Birthday Sir David! You truly deserve it!

04/05/2026

Yesterday morning, I visited the Bromore Cliffs near Ballybunion for a guided tour as part of the MOYA festival over the weekend. Mike, the guide, showed visitors caves, arches and sea stacks in the area while pointing out some of the bird species found here, and I was lucky to see several fulmars, a couple of ravens, some razorbills and a chough during the tour. It was definitely an enjoyable morning and the birds certainly made it memorable!

11/04/2026

Yesterday I made my second and final visit to the Domain of the Dinosaurs exhibition in the Glucksman Gallery in Cork, as the exhibition will be wrapping up tomorrow. This time, I thought it would be fun to take close up shots of the skulls of all the skeletal casts except for the pterosaurs.

23/03/2026

🐻🐻‍❄️🐼Happy World Bear Day!🐼🐻‍❄️🐻

To celebrate, I've decided to share one photo I've got of six of the eight bear species I've seen over the past 16 years (the oldest of these photos is from 2019). Which species is your favourite?

21/03/2026

Went to Fota on a field trip with MTU Kerry on Thursday, and the weather was brilliant for the day as we were given a tour of the park. We were shown the inside of the giraffe house, which I previously saw when I attended the summer camp 13 years ago, and as we were heading back from the house, I spotted a red squirrel climbing up a tree, though I was too late to snap it. We also got to see Indian rhino Jai and the three 2-year old lion cubs before they leave in the coming weeks; Jai is headed for Edinburgh, while the lions will be going to Wingham Wildlife Park in Kent. We were also lucky to see some of the most recent babies, including the cheetah cubs and a colobus monkey (or mantled guereza), as well as a few kangaroos with joey legs sticking out of their pouches. Truly an awesome field trip it was!

All photos were taken with my phone.

06/02/2026

🎉🎈🎁🐻Happy 10th birthday Lola!🐻🎁🎈🎉

Lola the spectacled bear was born at Belfast Zoo on February 6 2016. When her birth was announced that July, I urged my parents to organise a visit so we could see her, and so we went up that August on my first ever train journey to Belfast. It was my first time ever seeing a bear cub that young, and along with other animal highlights from the day, Lola inspired me to develop my own cartoon based on the animals of Belfast Zoo, to which I've been dedicated since that day.

I would continue to see Lola on most visits to Belfast Zoo until 2020, when she left for Cologne Zoo where she is now joined by a male partner. I do hope to visit Cologne someday to see Lola again, a visit that would definitely be made all the more special if she has cubs of her own!

To learn more about Lola and the bears of Belfast Zoo, you can read my latest essay here:http://davidtwamley.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/The-Bears-of-Belfast-Zoo.pdf

17/01/2026

🐻 My latest animal-related essay has been published, and what better topic to cover than the bears of Belfast Zoo! 🐻

As the spectacled bears and sun bears have meant so much to me over the past 14 years, I decided they would make great subjects to research and write about, first giving a general overview of each species, and then discussing the history of each species in Belfast Zoo. Having already written an essay on sun bears, I took some information from that essay while ensuring it is up-to-date regarding the species' history in Belfast as they're no longer kept there.

Learn all about the Belfast bears in my latest blog post containing the essay in PDF:

15/01/2026

This morning, I returned to the Marine Life aquarium (formerly Sea Life) in Bray as I had planned just after christmas. My main intention was to check on the axolotl nursery, and I was very fortunate to see that the eggs from last time had hatched into tiny axolotl larvae (a total of 27, I counted!). I was also lucky enough to watch the adult axolotls getting fed in the tank nearby, with worms drifting down to the tank floor to be snatched up by the salamanders. In addition, the zebra shark and guitarfish at the end of the aquarium were in a prime position for me to get good photos, unlike last time.

10/01/2026

Yesterday I made this year's first visit to Fota Wildlife Park, which was also my first visit since they closed due to bird flu. My main highlight was seeing as many as seven free roaming ring-tailed lemurs appear at the door while I was in the Madagascar house, performing handstands as they scent-marked the wall and the door, with two of the lemurs hanging around for two minutes below the tanks in the house. I also got to see Omotayo, the first drill monkey to be born in Ireland, frolicking around indoors with the adult drills, and listened to one of the lar gibbons calling. All in all, I had a great time in Fota despite the cold, with not too many people around.

08/01/2026

It's been a year since my amazing day at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, visiting the Ménagerie and the two natural history museums, so I've decided to share more photos from the Galerie de Paleontologie et d'Anatomie Comparée that weren't featured in last year's post. Most of these photos come from the Palaeontology gallery, what with hundreds of intriguing fossils to marvel at, but I've also included photos I took in the Comparative Anatomy gallery at ground floor.

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