Whether you expect to find something from the mongoose family in a bird park or not, that’s what you will find in Almuñécar: a whole bunch of Meerkats.

Now, the reason that there is a whole bunch of them at the Parque Ornitológico Loro Sexi is because a female gave birth last month to some reinforcements for the original (magnificent) seven that had been transferred down from the Peña Escrita mountain park… which they had shared with tigers, a hippopotamus, lions a bear and the occasional human visitor.

Anyway, there are now a bristling quantity of nine meerkats – one of the keeper arrived one morning to find two additions and that was that. The mother had kept them down in the warren until she deemed it safe to present the to the world.

“Judging by their size,” explained one of the keepers, “we think that they were born about a month ago.”

The fact is that they live down in their burrows until a keeper comes round to feed them their diet of fruit, dry feed and mince meat – a spot of champagne and caviar now and then, of course.

So far, no names have been assigned to the sneaky two arrivals, mainly because, you can’t tell them apart, anyway.

(News: Almunecar, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)