Melbourne and also our 7th Wedding Anniversary !
Today we decided to visit a local wildlife sanctuary as until now we have seen just one wallaby and a few very distant kangaroos, plus heard but not seen plenty of kookaburras and a short encounter with a large cockatoo. So a taster but not much of the unusual wildlife they have here.
The Moonlit Sanctuary is a relatively small animal park, and as the name suggests its better to visit in the evening as most of the animals are somewhat nocturnal. However you need to book this and so we just went for the day visit and were rewarded with – a lot of sleeping animals!!
That said, we did see enough of them awake for a worthwhile introduction to some of the marsupials and other indigenous species.
We fed 2 different types of wallabies, the Swamp Wallaby (smaller grey one) and the Red Necked Wallaby (bigger, darker and a bit prone to bullying the others). We also saw something called a Red Bellied Pademelon, but these (very small) animals do not come up for feeding. The one we saw ran across in front of us like he had a rocket up his bottom!!
We saw quite a few other interesting species, unfortunately the photos are not great in some cases due to the cage wire, but better than not seeing them at all.
Later, we went back the the Koalas as they were all asleep facing away from us at the start. We were rewarded by a couple of them in new positions where we could actually see their faces. All their sleeping positions look so uncomfortable, but I overheard a keeper explaining that they have bony plates for sitting bones and no nerve endings there so they can wedge themselves into the tree branches and sleep quite happily – without getting a numb bum! Apparently wombats have the same bones but use them to defend their burrows, so the 2 species are distantly related.
