About the Museum

Colchester's Natural History Museum is the place to go for information on your local wildlife. Whether you want to find out about local habitats, get something identified or give the children a quick break from the shopping, there's always something interesting to see and it's free to get in!

The Museum's permanent displays feature recreations of habitats found in the Colchester area and begin with the life found in our local sea, the North Sea.

Through the porthole you can see fish, birds and marine mammals in their natural element.

The marine theme continues as we move to the mudflats where each winter flocks of Brent Geese feed up after their long journey from Siberia. The Beach Cafe shows how different birds are adapted to feeding on a variety of animal life and the unique limestone beds at Dovercourt are the subject of a display on rock pools.

Message in a Bottle, our beachcombing exhibit, enables you to identify some of the things both natural and manmade, that you might pick up on the shoreline and there's an interactive lifty-box to try, too. The final marine display is a diorama of Fingringhoe marshes, one of the original museum displays, it remains as popular today as when it was installed in the 1960's.

A section on live animals with stick insects and fish leads you to the geology area where life-sized cut-outs show what it would have been like to meet a mammoth face to knee! You can also see a mammoth tusk and fossil evidence that hippos once lived on Mersea Island. There's a chance to touch the specimens on the fossil wall and learn about the Colchester earthquake which shook the town in 1884.

Leaving the geology section the Stag Beetle display shows you all aspects of this fascinating insect and then (if you're small enough) visit our crawl-through badger sett before seeing the more familiar territory of the domestic garden and its wildlife by both day and night.

Try the video-microscope and see mini-beasts as you've never seen them before!

Finally, check out some of Colchester's park life and a section on the wildlife of The River Colne.

On your way out why not buy a souvenir or present at our well-stocked gift-shop?

As well as the permanent displays there are always new things to see and do throughout the year. In spring you can watch the Blue Tits feeding their young live on screen thanks to our camera hidden in their bird-box. In the summer holidays why not visit our popular summer exhibition where the emphasis is very much on hands-on and craft activities for all the family.

Or, if its fine, why not have a walk around the old churchyard now managed as a wildlife garden, where you can see unusual flowers and perhaps squirrels, stag beetles and mining bees?