Melbourne Zoo and Healesville Animal Sanctuary, Melbourne, Australia

Echidnas at the Melbourne Zoo

(Here is one of my diary entries from our three-month stay in Melbourne in 1999.)

Last week I made my first visit to the Melbourne zoo.  It has recently been renovated so that most of the animals are now in natural enclosures.  I am particularly interested in the native species and enjoyed watching a group of echidnas (creatures that look a bit like porcupines with long noses) scurry around their enclosure.  Apparently, when they are alarmed, they curl up into spiny balls, an effective defense against most predators.  Echidnas (also known as spiny anteaters) are the only other egg laying mammal besides the platypus.

Echidna foot, designed for digging

One of the echidna keepers was chatting with patrons.  Somebody asked him a question which he interpreted as needing a closer look, so he simply went over to one of the echidnas and grabbed it and brought it over.  He said that after you've done it once you get used to it and never use gloves again.  He had just fed the echidnas their dinner--not ants, but a gloppy mixture of protein chow and other stuff--and it was neat to see the animals stick out their long, pink tongues and reel in the food.

Wombat, Melbourne Zoo

The zoo also has a nice wombat exhibit where you can see the wombats (animals that resemble a cross between a dog and a bear) both in their underground warrens and above ground.  There are many good exhibits at the zoo including an incredible butterfly house where the air is filled with hundreds of colorful butterflies that will actually land on your finger or hair if you stand quietly. The Melbourne Zoo has a bobcat, but somehow it seems out of place in the southern hemisphere!  They also have a fishing cat (from Asia I think) with four lively kittens who like to bat things around in the small pool in their enclosure. Of course, except for the dingo, there are no native non-marsupial predators in Australia. The zoo also has  an enormous aviary where you can see birds up close, but we have actually seen many of the same birds in the wild.  Last weekend we had our first sighting of wild kookaburras and heard their eerie, loud, laughing call.

Healesville Animal Sanctuary

Dingo taking a walk, Healesville Animal Sanctuary

We saw the kookaburras on the way to the Healesville Animal Sactuary which is about 45 minutes east of Melbourne in the beautiful Yarra Valley.  The Yarra Valley is a fruit and wine growing region that is very similar in its appearance to Sonoma and Napa counties in Northern California.  We stopped for lunch along the way at a place called The Dairy, which is an actual working dairy that has a small restaurant where one can sample their cheeses and look out across the landscape.  We arrived at Healesville toward the end of the afternoon which turned out to be clever planning because we found a great many of the animals active and busily moving around in their enclosures.  Healesville only has native Australian animals, and most of these are nocturnal so it is usually difficult to find them awake.  We were surprised to find even the koalas climbing around in their branches.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: Botanical Garden and Veterans Memorial

Flowers in the Royal Botanic Garden, Melbourne, Australia

In honor of Veterans Day, here is an excerpt from my diary of our three-month stay in Melbourne, Australia in 1999.

On Saturday we drove to the Royal Botanic Garden which is on the other side of the city center.  This huge park has extensive walking paths and all sorts of  native and exotic trees and flowers.  We saw several new birds and we are told that this is the place to go to see the fruit bats.  These huge bats, which have wingspans of four feet, apparently love to eat the fruit on all the carefully planted specimen trees and are a bit of a problem.  We were told that you can’t see the bats during the day, so we’ll have to go back sometime at dusk. 

Veterans’ Memorial

Shrine of Remembrance

At one end of the park is a large memorial to the 20,000 soldiers of Victoria who died in World War I.  When you realize that the population of Australia was quite small back then, you can see what an impact this had on the society.  The memorial building is approached on all sides by banks of steep steps, reminiscent of a Mayan temple.  At the top one goes inside to a room where a memorial plaque is embedded in the center of the floor.  The amazing aspect of the building is that it has a small hole in the roof placed exactly so that each year, on November 11, at 11:00 am, a ray of sunlight moves across the plaque, highlighting the word “love.”  During the rest of the year they simulate the light ray once an hour to demonstrate to visitors how it works.  It definitely has a powerful, almost mystical effect.

Floral Clock and Art Museum

Floral Clock, Melbourne Botanical Garden

We then walked to the other end of the park, passing numerous wedding parties having their photos taken, and took our picture in front of the huge floral clock at the park entrance.  Then we crossed the street to visit the Victorian art museum where we did a quick tour of the Australian collection.  The pictures from the 19th century are a fascinating peek into the hardship of pioneer life in Australia as well as a view of the vast, forbidding, but also beautiful, landscape they encountered.  (Note: There is now a new art museum at two sites, one in Southbank and the other at Federation Square.)

Back to the Botanic Garden and the Flying Foxes

Grey-headed Flying Fox (a kind of fruit bat)

A week later we finally got to see the fruit bats in the Botanic Gardens.  There are hundreds of them and you can’t miss them because they make such a racket.  We went late Sunday afternoon and found them hanging from the branches of tall trees in a place called Fern Gully.  It was a hot day so they were fanning themselves with their huge wings and even flying about a bit.  Last week, when the park ranger told me that you couldn’t see the bats until dark, I think that my mistake was asking about bats--I should have asked to see the flying foxes, which is what people call the large fruit bats here.  Those that live in the park are grey-headed flying foxes and have pointed snouts that make them look a little bit like foxes.  The term bats is used here for the little insect eating bats, and those don’t come out until dark.  We found a group that lives in a tree near our apartment and watched them one evening as they emerged from a hole in the trunk and flew off to catch bugs on the golf course.