Anna's Wild Life

After decades as a TV celebrity Anna Ryder Richardson and her restaurateur husband Colin have turned their back on city life and bought a run-down zoo in west Wales. One of the animals they have inherited is a middle aged Gibbon who has spent his entire life behind metal bars in a small cage at the zoo.

Anna, Colin and the team inherited a bachelor group of four male meerkats. They are determined to introduce a female to the group and start a big meerkat family. The beautiful female Sahara arrives at the zoo and goes into quarantine. But there is a problem. Before young Sahara can decide which of the boys is to be her mate she has to make it into the enclosure successfully.

South American Tapirs love to swim. At the Zoo, Tommy the Tapir has lived alone in an enclosure without a pond for several years. New owners Anna and Colin want to know if he still knows how to swim. As an added bonus they find him a mate, Rio, for company and then set to building them a lovely new enclosure complete with swimming pool.

It’s baby time at the zoo. Anna and her team welcome all sorts of furry and feathered newcomers into the zoo family in this episode. But where there is new life, there is also old age and two of the zoo’s favourite animals need visits from the vet.

The zoo is more than just a zoo and Anna’s husband Colin wants to make sure that there are enough other exhibits in the park. His eye has been caught by an extraordinary sculpture. The only problem is that it’s 30 feet tall, over 200 miles away and takes a crane on the front lawn in the middle of summer to sort out. And that’s assuming he and Anna can agree where to put it!

Steve’s mate, Lisa, shows distinct signs of being pregnant as Anna prepares for a visit to the park from an old celebrity friend. But in the end it’s another new arrival that steals her heart.

Ever since they bought the Zoo and started to convert it to a modern wildlife park, Anna and Colin have wanted to get a rhino. But they want to do it right. Such a large and rare animal not only needs to be correctly cared for, but should only be held in captivity if there are good conservation reasons for doing so.

Anna takes her leave of the family and heads off to Tsavo East National Park to help the Kenya Wildlife Service track down the Black Rhino in this vast wilderness. It’s a high octane chase with helicopters, spotter planes and trucks. But behind it is a very serious purpose. Without a proper survey of Rhino numbers there can be no real idea just how bad the poaching situation is.