As a bird watcher, I resisted going to a bird park to watch birds until a relative could not use his pre-purchased tickets a few weeks ago. We went to the park on a Saturday and arrived at 3:30pm. We saw a lot of birds, it was kind of overwhelming !
When we got to the park, we walked straight into the bird sanctuary - many exotic species of big hornbills were locked behind small cages/nets like prisoners - they could not fly freely, they could not forage. It was a sad scene, and it annoyed me. The penguin cove was ok, ironically the restaurants and stores are larger than cove itself., it seems the goal of the cove was to lure customers in, to eat, to buy stuff.
It was late, the amphitheater was closed already, so we did not go there and surrounding area.
We visited 4 main outdoor areas - Heart of Africa, Wing of Asia, Mysterious Papua, and Australian Outback. These 4 areas are segregated, each under a giant net.
We entered the Heart of Africa section from the shuttle station side, and were greeted by the chorus of bird songs! There were so many birds in the woods under the board walk, and olive backed sunbirds and crimson sun birds were the familiar ones, and there were many new species to us, including superb starling, and the weaver birds - which I was trying to locate in the open world for sometime. We were pleased to see quite a few different species of weaver birds including vieillot's black weaver, orange weaver and chestnut weaver. It was interesting to see some large exotic birds which were just different species of pigeons - speckled pigeon was one.
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| superb starling |
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| Vieillot's black weaver |
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| orange weaver |
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| chestnut weaver |
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| speckled pigeon |
Wing of Asia houses mostly common birds in Southeast Asia, egrets, herons, pigeons, spoonbills, painted storks, ...nothing special for us.
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| black faced spoonbill |
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| painted stork |
When we were wondering what different bird species there are in Mysterious Papua, we were greeted by a crimson sunbird - which stayed at its perch all the time we were around - we observed one main feature of the bird - the two black strips on its red neck. The sign in the area indicated that there are crown pigeons around. As we turned the corner, there was a big bird with a crown, it was standing there waiting for us to see it...it was a crown pigeon!
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| crimson sunbird |
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| crowned pigeon |
In the section Australian outback, we saw quite a few birds we saw during
our trip to Perth West Australia, which included galah, Laughing kookaburras, parakeets. There were a few we saw for the first time: red tailed black cockatoo, tawny frogmouth. Tawany Fogmouth is just like a piece of tree bark when it closes its eyes.
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| papuan eclectus (male) |
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papuan eclectus (female)
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| red tailed black cockatoo |
Overall the bird park is too small for so many birds compartmented into different giant nests to let them have natural food...they have to be fed man-made food, which attracted a lot of mice! We saw a family of mice having birds' food in Australia outback at the park. A couple of park employees happened to passing by. They shooed at the mice and kept walking, apparently it was not an one off incident. A few days later there was news that the bird park was infested of mice!
The mandai bird paradise in Singapore is a ok park.
