The mornings are cool so yesterday we got up early and before 9am were at the Territory Wild Life Park - it’s a cross between Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo and Desert Park in Alice Springs - and features the flora and fauna of the Top End. There are displays where you can feed whip rays, walk through the aquarium and get up close and personal with a salty, a huge aviary with raised paths and platforms and a display with free flying native birds including the jabiru, raptor, owls and buzzards plus heaps of natural bushland.
You can walk bush trails or take a shuttle train - we did both and spent nearly 8 hours at the park!
We did a “behind the scenes” tour and got to see where the vet works, food prep areas for various animals and an insight into a quoll (a small native animal a bit like a miniature possum) breeding program. The introduction of the poisonous cane toad which are eaten by native animals has been a huge problem. A woman has a project to discourage quolls from eating cane toads - she takes baby non poisonous cane toads and coats them with a product which has no taste or smell but which when eaten by the quoll makes them sick but does not kill them. After a meal of the treated toad the quoll refuses to eat them again. Quolls which take part in this program have a very successful survival rate. An interesting approach to a very serious problem!
