Blogs from Perth, Western Australia, Australia, Oceania - page 6

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

So I wasn’t sure quite how to approach the almost five weeks I had in Perth with regards to this thread. Most of the time was actually not doing anything very interesting, and I only did some birding in the mornings and evenings, and fitted stuff in whenever I could. Though my day trip to Rottnest Island certainly deserves its own post, and I plan to review the six different zoos that I visited while in Perth. There were also little bits and pieces of birding and wildlife watching here and there that deserve a mention so in this post I’m going to go through week by week what I did mentioning the noteworthy wildlife here and there and making a note of the stuff that I’m going to give separate posts to. ---------- Week One ... read more

After breakfast, we headed out for a day of birding to possibly central Perth’s best and most famous birding site, Herdsman Lake. This promised to be a very good day of birding… but the weather disagreed. It was raining in the morning and continued raining as we drove to Herdsman lake. When we got there it was still raining so we parked near the visitor centre and ran in to look around. There were several live animal exhibits here and various displays about wildlife, introduced species, etc. The live animals held were King’s Skink, Motorbike Frog, Splendid Tree Frog, Oblong Turtle, Western Bluetongue, and a tank with introduced fish species. Now the thing I’m wondering about – is this a zoo? Also in the visitor centre on an upstairs floor was a bird hide looking out ... read more