Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

Two books have dominated the last few weeks for us: Running Wild by Michael Morpurgo (which we have been listening to) and The Giant Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry. Morpurgo's book is set in the Indonesian/Malaysian rainforest and its heroes are orang-utans and an Asian elephant, and The Giant Kapok Tree features animals like a boa constrictor, a sloth and a jaguar who reside in the Amazonian rainforest.

After a learning a bit more about the different layers of the rainforest, and singing a rather catchy song about the rainforest, we went to the zoo to try and find some of the stars in our books.

Twycross has a large selection of apes and monkeys so we spotted black and gold howler monkeys, spider monkeys and siamang gibbons, all of whom would be found in the canopy. We also saw the male orang-utan, sitting high up on his perch, and our favourite apes, the thoroughly entertaining bonobos.

The Butterfly House contains many tropical butterflies so we felt like we were entering the understory of the rainforest in here. And we were intrigued to encounter leaf cutter ants as we were diligently washing our hands in the toilet, also inhabitants of the understory.

The zoo has a relatively new acquisition, a Sumatran tiger. In Running Wild, Will (the main protagonist) is very moved by his stand-off with a tiger in the rainforest, and recalls the William Blake poem he learnt at school which seems to give him strength. Ferdy really liked the part of the poem we read and was quite excited at the thought of us seeing a version of the tiger that Will had confronted. We only caught a glimpse of it and were struck by its size, but I also felt slightly miserable about how much it was pacing up and down, up and down.

Later on, we watched David Attenborough's Jungle, his documentary on our planet's hothouses and astonishingly, home to half of the world's species. For pudding we also had some palm oil free chocolate and Ferdy entertained us with his black sickle bill bird of paradise dance.