Calling All Photographers!

Are you a nature photographer looking for some great subjects?

Sylvan Heights is pleased to offer a new membership package just for photographers. When you buy a Photographer’s Membership, you’ll receive free admission to Sylvan Heights Waterfowl Park for one year, as well as free admission to the North Carolina Zoo, all three NC Aquariums and the WNC Nature Center. In addition, you’ll receive a subscription to our newsletter, View from the Heights, and get a 10% discount in the Sylvan Heights Gift Shop.

All these great benefits are available with any Individual Membership, but what makes our Photographer’s Membership so special, is that members can call in advance and make arrangements to visit the park an hour before it opens to the public and/or stay an hour after park closing! This special benefit provides photographers like you with quiet, quality photography time uninterrupted by park visitors! And you can also take advantage of great morning and evening lighting in which to capture your subjects.

(And it’s also the perfect opportunity to take some great pictures that you can enter in this year’s photography contest here at the park. Keep this site bookmarked for upcoming information about the park’s contest.)

Another bonus is that your Photography Membership can be upgraded to include a guest or family, so your spouse and children can come enjoy the park as well.

For more information, please contact our membership department here.

Ground Breaking

This past Friday at 1 pm, we broke ground for the second phase of development here at the park. This exciting new phase will include the first public, wheelchair-accessible tree house in the state of North Carolina. The tree house is part of a five-acre expansion and wetland restoration project that will allow our visitors to experience first-hand the sights and sounds of a forested wetland habitat and its wildlife. Park board members and visitors trekked a short distance to the site of our future tree house to listen to our park’s Executive Director, Mike Lubbock, and other dignitaries, including Scotland Neck Mayor James Mills and Halifax Department of Tourism Executive Director Lori Medlin who described some of the unique features of Phase Two and thanked everyone for supporting Sylvan Heights.

We must express our sincere appreciation to The N.C. Departments of Justice, The Rural Center, Touchstone Energy Cooperatives, The Cannon Foundation and The Conservation Fund for contributing more than $320,000 to support our expansion and wetland education programs. The park's expansion would not be possible without your generosity.

Sponsorship opportunities are available. To learn more about how you can sponsor one of the areas in our next phase of development, please contact Sylvan Heights at (252) 826-3186. Construction has already begun, so visitors will see a lot of activity and progress being made over the next few months. A grand opening is scheduled for this summer and we hope you will all join us for it.

Posted by: Monica Hazelton

Are You Flamingo Savvy?

One of Sylvan Height’s most popular attractions is the Flamingo Exhibit. Located in the center of the park, our flock is a mix of lesser and Chilean flamingos. Visitors can enter the exhibit to view these colorful birds from a viewing deck located on the edge of the flamingo’s pool.

To celebrate the popularity of these birds, we’re excited to bring you the first installment of our "Think Pink" series, which will bring to you interesting information about flamingos once a month. We’ll try to cover a little bit of everything, from their biology to their history in captivity. And we’ll also include facts about the flamingo flock here at Sylvan Heights. So if you’re an avid flamingo afficionado, or your children have a research project that they need help with, or you're simply a fan of anything related to Sylvan Heights, hopefully you’ll find some useful information here.

How many flamingos are there?

One of the most distinct birds in the world, flamingos are instantly recognizable. To most people, flamingos are those tall, pink birds with the long legs and neck. And that’s absolutely correct. But did you know that there are six different kinds of flamingos? In Europe and Africa, you can find the greater and the lesser flamingos. In the Americas, there are the Caribbean flamingo, the Chilean flamingo, the Andean flamingo, and the James’s flamingo. And believe it or not, they can all be distinguished from each other. There are small differences, such as the size of their bodies, shape of their beaks, and the color of their beaks, eyes, feathers or even legs!

Take a look at these pictures of both flamingo species at Sylvan Heights. You’ll see a lesser flamingo on the left and a Chilean on the right. Can you see the differences in eye, beak and feather color? What about the shape of the head? The Chilean’s is slightly longer, less compact. They also tend to be larger birds with longer legs that are more of a pale pink compared to the lesser’s dark pink ones.

Next time you visit the park, take a little trip down to the Flamingo Exhibit and see if you can pick out the Chilean from the lesser flamingos. Then come back here and leave us a comment letting us know how you did!

We'll post more information about flamingos in our Think Pink installment next month. Until then, we'll be bringing you updates about the park, including events, membership opportunities, animal adoption kits and, of course, introducing you to more of the beautiful animals living at Sylvan Heights.

Welcome and Tundra Swan Project

Warmest welcome to all!

We're so happy to present to you the official blog of Sylvan Heights Waterfowl Park. Located in Scotland Neck, NC, Sylvan Heights is the world’s largest waterfowl park and continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Our main focus is providing our visitors a first-class experience in education, conservation and fun.

We plan to use this blog as a way to keep everyone informed about the spectacular birds at the park, like the Tundra swans we're blogging about today. We'll also let you know about any changes and additions to the park, including up-coming events, our education programs, and new exhibit openings.


Many of the visitors to the park really enjoy getting to see our Tundra swans up close. These beautiful birds are a true native of North America and breed on Alaska's North Slope. They then migrate east through Canada and the Carolinas. This unusual migration consists of traveling up to 8,000 miles round trip, and has been passed down from parent to offspring for countless generations. Tundra swans rely on tundra wetland habitat for breeding, wetland staging areas throughout their migration, and wintering grounds where parents and young can rest and feed.

The education department at Sylvan Heights is fortunate to be able to participate in the Tundra Swan Migration Research Program. It was developed by the Environmental Studies at Airlie, but Sylvan Heights educators contributed to the program by developing its educational component, which introduces middle and high school students to the world of field biology and wildlife research.

The park's education staff, Dan Louk and Carla Taylor, show the students how to collect data which allows the students to follow the swans and the research being conducted, share field observations and openly communicate with other participating schools across the continent. Students learn to use scientific equipment, conduct interviews, collect and analyze data and write a final research report. Local groups such as schools, scouts, college classes may sign up for this program and Sylvan Heights educators then schedule sessions and a trip to try to locate the collared swans.

If you're in the local area, and this sounds like a project you’d like your child or student to participate in, send an e-mail message to blog@shwpark.com, and we’ll forward your e-mail to our education department for more details. To learn more about this fantastic research program, click here to visit the North Carolina Office of Environmental Education's project description page, or visit swanmigration.org to see the map displaying each collared swan’s current location!

If you'd like to see the Tundra swans here at the park, you can find them in the North American Aviary. If you’ve never been to the park, here’s what you can expect: the park is home to over 1,000 birds, including many rare and endangered species. You can enjoy close-up encounters with many of these birds in our large walk-through aviaries, each of which represents species from six continents. Gardens and shaded picnic areas are located throughout the park, and your children will love our playground area. Many exciting new exhibit openings are in the works for this spring and summer, so check back with this blog often for more information.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to the Sylvan Heights Waterfowl blog! In our sidebar, you’ll find a way to subscribe to our blog, which will deliver new postings directly to your email. Or you can bookmark our page for easy retrieval. We also want to hear from you. Feel free to click the comment button to let us know what you think. We're planning to post a new blog entry about every week, so stay tuned for our next post, which will feature one of the most recognizable birds in the world--the flamingo.