The Mogo Zoo

On Saturday, 9 February, we went to a local zoo, called the Mogo Zoo, in the town of Mogo which is an old mining town just east of here. I will do another post on Mogo itself because it is a really neat little place. It is a private zoo, so there is no government funding. It isn't a big zoo, but they had a nice selection of animals. One animal they are famous for is the white lion. The white lion has been extinct in the wild for the last ten years, but the Mogo Zoo has 12, from an initial three lions they acquired in 1994. The most recent addition was a set of five male cubs born one year ago; they celebrated their first birthday on 11 February. Here's a link: http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23208514-5006009,00.html















The zoo also had some regular lions, and we were able to hear a talk by one of the keepers about the lions and other large cats. He had a snack of chicken pieces for them, but the tigers were too sleepy (they sleep 23 hours a day!) but the one lioness knew he was coming and was pacing along the fence. The keepers make the lion lift itself up to a standing posotion on theeir hind legs with their front paws on the chain link fence. The keepers use this opportunity of giving the cats a snack to check on the state of their paws, pads, claws and teeth. Very interesting.

The zoo had lots of monkeys, including tiny and adorable tamarins and marmosets, and a display called the Primate Islands, where the primates (lemurs, spider monkeys, gibbons, siamangs) were not in cages, but on islands separated from each other and the viewing area for zoo visitors by a series of moats. It was a really nice way to show these creatures, and we were able to walk most of the way around this area to see the various monkeys.

The red pandas were just very cute, they looked like stuffed animals, and had a very endearing way of sleeping:














The most adorable of all the animals, however, were the meerkats. Just like in Madagascar! They were scampering around making little squeaking noises. One was almost always on guard, looking out for predators, mainly birds of prey. We were fortunate enough to be there at snack time, and one of the keepers climbed into the pen with a bowl full of meal worms. The meerkats just swarmed her and some climbed up onto her lap. One of them will allow the keeper to pet it, and it even climbed into the sleeve of her fleece jumper and out through the neck, waist or sleeve a number of times. We could hardly tear ourselves away from their pen.




























The zoo was small enough that we were able to wander around and back to our favourite exhibits as many times as we liked, and we had beautiful weather for a nice day out.
http://www.mogozoo.com.au/pages/index.asp

Lorikeets and Rosellas

Just a couple more picturesof the rainbow lorikeets, and I managed to take a picture of the crimson rosellas before they flew away.

Rainbow Lorikeets

One of our favourite birds here in Australia is the Rainbow Lorikeet. We have a couple of pairs that often come to our deck to feed, and they are just beautiful and very friendly. They are about two-thirds the size of the Australian King Parrot. If one of us holds our hand out with some seed on it, the lorikeet will land right on our hand and eat out of it. They will also eat out of our hand if we are resting it on the deck railing. When they are feeding, they chirp and twitter very quietly the whole time and when they fly they are like brightly coloured jewels flitting around. Here are a couple of links for some more infornation:

http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/finder/display.cfm?id=97
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Lorikeet





























I did see a few Crimson Rosellas on our deck this morning (18 Feb), however, and may need to amend this post about the lorikeets being our favourite bird! I didn't get a photo because they flew away (we had a kookaburra that wanted feeding, too). Here's a link to what they look like:
http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/finder/display.cfm?id=50

Woolies

Woolworths (affectionately known as Woolies) is a large supermarket chain here in Australia. Now, this blog is not an advertisement for Woolies; there are other good supermarkets around here, but this blog is about Woolies and their campaign called Drought Action '08. A slogan they use for this is "Backing our Farmers".
There has been a drought across most of this country for a decade at least (I'm sure someone will comment and correct me on this!), and there are other issues facing the farmers here, so for one day, which happened to be 15 February (Happy Flag Day, Canada!) they donated the entire day's supermarket profits to help the Australian farming community. So, I made sure I did a big shop there that day. What a great idea, I mean this is a very large chain store here, so one day's takings is probably a pittance for the company, but what a great boost to the farmers of this nation. Here is a link: http://woolworthsdroughtaction.com.au/

"They're chooks, Mr. Tweedy!"

Yes, we have chickens in Australia, and they call them chooks here. The family we are exchanging with kept chooks and asked if we would like to take care of them while we were here. At first we didn't think so, because of caring for them and what to do with them when we go away exploring Australia, but a couple of months before we left it was decided that we would keep the chooks. Our neighbours down here looked after them during the Canada-Australia transition, and now we have four and they have kept five. I've never kept chooks before, so this is another new experience. My sister has some back in Canada and it's always fun going to her farm and having the chickens pecking around. These four chooks here are really nice to have. They are friendly, have some funny habits, eat all our compostables, and provide us with fresh eggs, two to three every day. We have named them, too. My apologies to the family that owns them if they had names before! This is what we are now calling them: The speckledy one is Sally, the two black ones are Henny and Penny (because we can barely tell them apart) and the white one is Babs. Aren't they cute?

Spiders: Part I

One thing that intrigued us about Australia was the wildlife. I don’t mean all the cute story book animals like kangaroos, koalas and echidnas, I mean the real wildlife, the snakes and spiders. We live in an area where there are no saltwater crocodiles, so that is one thing not to have to worry about, but there are snakes and spiders. We haven’t seen any snakes, and probably won’t, but there are lots of spiders, and they are BIG. There is one, called the huntsman, which this story revolves around.

One of our neighbours told me a story of when she was driving in her mini van one day and looked at her driver’s side window and saw a huntsman on the window. Slowly she took off one of her thongs (flip-flops) and started whacking the window. When she saw that the spider was still there she realized that it was on the outside and breathed a sigh of relief. My story happened yesterday (12 Feb.) when I was driving down to my daughter’s school in our car.

I had been driving for at least 15 minutes when I noticed a huntsman on the driver’s side window, only this one was definitely on the inside of the car because a couple of its legs were on the window and the rest of it was on the door frame. I panicked, rolled the window down a few inches, pulled over to the side of the road and looked back to where the spider was and it was gone! More panicking as I wondered just where it had gone - had it crawled back down into the car? Had it crawled out of the car? (oh please, please, please!) I looked to the top of the windscreen and saw a couple of spider legs on the outside of the car and breathed a huge sigh of relief. I still had to sit there in my car at the side of the road for a couple of minutes to gather my wits, though. I did get out to see if it was still on the car, but it had gone.

Part of me wondered if indeed those legs were on the outside of the windscreen after all... I also wondered about the car ride so far and imagined the spider slowly crawling out from wherever it was holed up (under the driver’s seat? on the back seat? at my feet? just where was it when I got in the car...?) and up the door to get to where it was (I shudder to think about it). For the rest of the day, every time I got into the car I had a good look around to see if there were any more spiders lurking around.

I should say that the huntsman spider is harmless, it will kill other spiders, moths, and insects, so they are good to have around. They are just so darn huge! This is one we saw on our house window by the front door one night. We had left the curtain open a bit and the moths were all attracted to the light coming from the house and so had clustered about that spot, and the huntsman was just sitting there eating at will. It was fascinating to watch, a bit creepy, and I was thankful it was outside and not in (although we have had one in the house - don’t tell the girls!)