Knowsley Safari Park in Merseyside has welcomed 27 hand-built brick animals for the summer, which include a seven-foot tall Bengal tiger called Bryn, perfect for celebrating International Cat day today.
Bryn took a team of three builders over 390 hours to create, using more than 81,000 bricks. Over the last 100 years, hunting and forest destruction have reduced tiger populations from hundreds of thousands of animals to fewer than 2,500.
The trail of endangered species, which runs until 4th September, has been created to entertain and educate visitors. All 27 hand-built life-sized brick animals feature on the Red List of Threatened Species, published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). It highlights where and what actions need to be taken to save the building blocks of nature from extinction. Currently, more than 40,000 species are believed to be under threat.
Also included in the line-up is Oscar the Orangutan. He’s the handiwork of four modelmakers who spent 180 hours creating the masterpiece from 50,000 individual bricks. In the wild, orangutans need vast areas of connecting forest to live in, but between 1985 and 2007, these great apes lost 60% of their habitat due to deforestation and changes to land use, such as logging, palm oil production, mining and agricultural expansion.
Other brick models include a giant panda, green sea turtle, snow leopard and cheetah.
Each model is accompanied with an eye-catching and educational information board, which shares fun and interesting facts about each endangered species, as well as its level of threat, according to the IUCN’s Red List categorisation. These range from vulnerable to endangered, to critically endangered.
Brick builders spent more than 5,000 hours creating the 27 model animals – totalling 211 days, or 30 weeks – using over 1.1million bricks.
The collection follows Knowsley’s hugely successful BRICKLIVE in 2019 – the Ultimate Brick Safari – and last year’s beneath the waves display, Ocean BRICKLIVE.
Entry to the Endangered Species BRICKLIVE event is included within the standard admission fee.
Main image credit:Â Peter Byrne/PA Wire
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