There’s about three weeks of winter to go in South Africa and we are past the coldest months but still making sure our residents keep warm.

Every lion has a brick house with rooms for feeding and at least two wooden platforms of different sizes.

The den below the platform is a cool place to lie in summer and in winter with bales of hay as insulation and a deep hay bed a perfect place to curl up and keep warm.

We use hay from teff grass which is fine and especially soft. It’s lovely seeing the lions under the trees – just as nature intended – but these platform dens are a really important part of their world.

Somewhere to sit, survey their kingdom and roar, or to slip under to snooze and shelter. Or, as for the lions here, to be the perfect winter sunbed.