Today we are in Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia. I took a tour to the Territory Wildlife park- the interesting thing about this ‘zoo’ is that it only has animals from the Northern Territory. Australia is made up of regions/governing bodies and the Northern Territory is one of them.
The Territory Wildlife park was very nice even tho I only went to four exhibit areas. It had rained recently and the paths and woods were wet but thankfully there were very few mosquitos about. It was very warm and humid tho.
The Monsoon forest exhibit had lots of aviaries with colorful birds and some of them were in larger aviaries so they the photos don’t show a cage. The Billabog area had the Australian Pelican. The Woodland Walk had wallabies and wallaroos (no koalas as they aren’t in the Northern Territory). The wallabies let some folks pet them but I just watched them- they sure move funny. The last exhibit I went to was the nocturnal house- it had lots of poisonous animals so I didn’t say too long. I did really like two of the nocturnal birds- Tawny frogmouth and Australian Owlet Nightjar.
Interesting notes about Darwin/Australia:
- Darwin has been completely destroyed a number of times and then rebuilt- twice from cyclones and twice from bombing by the Japanese in World War II.
- There are so many crocodiles and sea serpents in the oceans and stream that folks (other than tourists) only swim in man-made swimming areas.
- Tourism is the fourth biggest industry in Australia with Natural Gas being number one
- 85 percent of the world’s mangoes come from Australia and they are all hand picked! Since Australia is so big the. season starts up north and continues throughout the year down into the south.
- Australia is the largest exporter of live camels to Saudi Arabia. The camels were used in Australia as freight carries and then when the railways and roads were built, the camels were left on their own so there is a large wild camel population in Australia. The camels in Saudi Arabia were decimated by war and upheaval and the gene pool had been reduced so they are importing camels from Australia to rebuild their camel population.
