FOTA Wildlife Park

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While we were in Cork, Ireland, we took a daytrip to a wildlife park that we had read about randomly in an atlas. My friend Kate and I thought it looked like a really cool place, the other girls weren't interested but they dropped us off on their way to a different tourist destination. The park was amazing! The moment we entered we could see giraffes and they had a huge field and even though there were fences, it was nothing like the zoo. Everything was much more open! FOTA has a lot of endangered species and a lot of them are able to roam free around the park and get along well with other animals. The giraffes also had ostriches, oryx, and zebra in the same field. They had a lot of cheetahs too! That's what impressed me the most, I had never seen a live cheetah and they had probably about ten of them and one baby! I guess they've had a lot of luck breeding these cheetahs in captivity, which is awesome because I remember learning that cheetahs have a hard time with that. They even had a cheetah run where a piece of meat was put on a zip line type device and the cheetahs are supposed to run after it for exercise. Kate and I watched the cheetahs for probably an hour, they were so funny because they would "talk" to eachother. They are so amazing, it really made me want to work with them in the future! The signs also mentioned how ecotourism was helping them in Namibia so that gives me some good ideas about a project I can work on for my internship this summer. I'm working for a ecotourism place based out of Boulder, I'm not sure how legitimate it really is but it would be cool to learn something about the business!
After we watched the cheetahs, we decided to look around the rest of the park as well. We went to an area with lots of monkeys and ducks. There are a ton of ducks in the world, pretty much everywhere you will find some kind of a duck! We saw some cool swans too, we found some we called them the antiswans because they are black with red on their nose and they had to be seperated from the other birds because they were known to be hostile. We also saw a lot of peacocks. It was really cool because it must have been mating season so these male peacocks were showing off to the females, i have a good picture of one. They would follow these females around and spread their feathers and even shake but the females just kind of ignored them. We watched that for quite a while too!
We saw all kinds of monkeys: gibbons, lemurs, and more with weirder names. We also saw some bison and capybaras, the world's largest rodent, some penguins, and some llamas. The map said there were kangaroos and lemurs, but we didn't see them where the map said and when we asked a worker, he said they're probably floating around the zoo somewhere. That's was the coolest part about the zoo, some animals had totally free range. Some couldn't of course, like the cheetah but certain animals could! Kate and I made one last walk around the park because we didn't see the kangaroos but on our last round we saw them! They were so cute, just hopping around! There was also a pack of lemurs making their way around, they even held up the park's train! They walked by me so close I could have bent down and petted them! I really wanted to but a park lady was standing there and she wouldn't have been too happy!
I'm really glad we went to FOTA, it was probably my favorite experience of Ireland, and I loved Ireland a lot!

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