My last particularly significant day of this trip was a day trip to Rottnest Island. I had tried to persuade my parents to allow me to spend a night at Rottnest, however, a day trip was the most I would get, starting with an early morning ferry, and leaving on the last ferry of the day in the late afternoon. We chose to take a ferry from Fremantle, about forty-five minutes by car from where I was staying in Perth. I tried to drag my family out of the house as soon as possible to be sure to get there on time, but we ended up leaving with barely enough time and it would have been alright if it wasn’t for the fact that we got lost. We didn’t get lost as such in that we ... read more

The next day, I did another fairly significant bit of birding, which was a visit to Yanchep National Park, an hour and a bit north of Perth. The main purpose of this day trip wasn’t actually for birding, but we were going there anyway to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday in the nice restaurant at Yanchep that overlooks the lake, but I got lots of birding in anyway. There were a few species that I was particularly looking for at Yanchep, including things like White-winged Fairy-wren, Southern Emu-wren, Purple-crowned Lorikeet, Elegant Parrot, and things like that. I didn’t actually see any of those four species though, and I think that would largely be because we were at the national park at a fairly poor time for birding (got there after the morning, and left before the evening) ... read more

Just down the road from the Armadale Reptile and Wildlife Centre is another small zoo, the Cohunu Koala Park. This is a very strange zoo and different to all of the other zoos that I have written about in this thread in that I thought it was terrible and it's really not worth visiting unless you want to see its weirdness in person or have a spare $15 dollars that you need to get rid of. The zoo has quite a large car park and from the car park you go through a gate in a fence which I assume is to keep the free-roaming animals from going onto the road. From here there is then quite a large area of empty land with nothing in it – not even plants – except the track for ... read more

The next zoo that I visited was AQWA, the Aquarium of Western Australia which is located in Hillarys Boat Harbour in the town/suburb of Hillarys which is quite a way north of Perth. It's not a huge aquarium, but has a wide range of species and exhibits from across Western Australia. From the outside the aquarium was quite a large building located right on the coastline. Just inside the entrance to the aquarium is a row of five small tanks, each representing the one of the different geographical sections that the aquarium is divided into, with each representing a different part of the Western Australian coastline separated by latitude. These different sections are the Perth Coast, Shipwreck Coast, Great Southern Coast, Far North Coast, and Coral Coast. The aquarium also has two sections that are not ... read more

Caversham Wildlife Park is quite a large zoo located a bit of a way North-east of Perth but still within the Perth suburbs. The zoo almost exclusively holds Australian native animals, and has a rather impressive species list with not too far below 200 species. I was particularly impressed at the diversity of native bird species held. The zoo is located within Whiteman Park which is a large recreational park with lots of bushland and lots of wild Western Grey Kangaroos which can be seen easily on the drive up to the zoo. I believe there are lots of birding opportunities in the park as well, but I didn’t actually have time to spend birding because the zoo does take quite a few hours to see thoroughly and is a bit of a drive from Perth. ... read more