International women's day 2017

To celebrate International Women’s Day we’ve put together a list of the fantastic females from our zoo…

With almost 100 species and 750 animals including penguins, monkeys, meerkats and lions, it’s clear to see from this list, that the females rule the roost.

Here are a few namely characters you can visit:

1. Luna the lioness – Female lions do all the hard graft in the wild spending most of their time hunting for food. At Folly Farm lioness Luna, is the dominant female and as a mum of four, she’s particularly protective and full of attitude. She makes sure everyone gets fed and teaches the girls how to be strong, fierce females when they grow up.

2. Vivian the Barbary macaque – Viv, who lives with one male and one other female, is particularly sassy and has unusual markings on her eyes, similar to a bit of eyeliner. Even though she’s the smallest monkey of the three, she is the most vocal and loves to tease her male roommate.

3. Blackcap the sloth – Recently reunited with her mate Tuppee, Blackcap is an independent woman, sleeping, eating and hanging out where she wants. She loves her food and often steals all the best bits, or sits on it so Tuppee can’t get to it.

4. Farah the ring tailed lemur – These four-legged primates live their whole life with their best girlfriends and see many males come and go. The ruffed lemurs are also pretty awesome and risk their lives to make nests for their babies up high in the trees away from danger.

5. Kinky the meerkat – These cute critters live in big family groups where most of them are related. At Folly Farm Kinky and Monty are the ‘top dogs’ and Kinky’s job is to make sure nobody gets pregnant except her, giving her babies more chance of survival and a whole host of child-free baby sitters to choose from – clever lady.

6. Lemur leaf frogs – At Folly there are 14 of these frogs found inside Folly Interactive. When it comes to dating, the females choose their significant other from the sound of his call. Once she’s decided which male she wants, she then carries him on her back to find a suitable site to lay her spawn.

7. Flamingo females – Equality is the name of the game for these birds. In their natural habitat, once they’ve picked their mate-for-life, they spend the rest of their time working together to find a nesting ground, making the nest and protecting their egg from predators and rival flamingos.

8. Espresso and Eggnog the Eider ducks – As home-birds, in the wild these animals nearly always return to breed on the same island where they hatched themselves – which means a lot of the ducks on each island are related. These ladies help each other out, and have developed a family cooperative sharing responsibility of sitting on the egg to give mum a break. The sisterhood doesn’t stop there, they continue to team-up and rear the ducklings together, a method called creching.