Exotic Birds in Australia

The Hyacinth macaws at Adelaide have been off display for two years (due to the pandas) but are getting a new aviary in the next couple of months. The palm cockatoos are always on display, and currently the recently born female is being introduced to its parents.
 
Cheers for that Electus.
You just saved me an imminent trip to Adelaide.
I will wait a few months then.
Do you know if the Adelaide Zoo allows visitors to interact with these parrots as an animal encounter or something?

To all contributors to the thread:
I asked earlier why there are not many Hyacinths and Palms in private hands (especially the Palms, as they are native). As an additional question, why aren't they found in more zoos (especially the Palm)? I mean, the Palms are native and not critically endangered, so what other piece in the puzzle am I missing?
 
nanoboy said:
Hey Flying High, not sure of your affiliation with the Bird Sanctuary...
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FLYING HIGH are the owners of the sanctuary (as of early 2010)
(and they don't have any hyacinths themselves, I imagine it's stock photos)
 
There is a bird encouter experience at Adelaide, but you cannot get hands on with the birds. The experience basically gives you the chance to feed and care for some of the birds at Adelaide, may not include palm cokatoo and hyacinths sometimes.
 
Chlidonias said:
FLYING HIGH are the owners of the sanctuary (as of early 2010)
(and they don't have any hyacinths themselves, I imagine it's stock photos)
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Wow! That is so awesome!
Some people dream of starting a Fortune 500 company, but they are living my own dream of owning a bird park.
Lucky guys.

I must visit if ever I am near there.
 
nanoboy said:
Wow! That is so awesome!
Some people dream of starting a Fortune 500 company, but they are living my own dream of owning a bird park.
Lucky guys.

I must visit if ever I am near there.
Click to expand...

Please do pop in. We are still working on a few things at the sanctuary as the previous owner got the place up and running and was happy with that. We are taking a different focus. We will be making some changes over the next few years to take the place to the next level. Unfortunately everything is taking longer than we like. There was a few unexpected things pop up and hit us in the face in our first 6 months of operating. Everything takes time and we are just a husband and wife team plus two elderly parents in law and time seems to be against us. The floods and rains have put us behind too as with 90% of most businessess in QLD.

Our goal is to get most of the species out of cages and flying in large one-two acre aviaries. Though the cockatoo species still may have to remain in other enclosures but they will most certainly be removed from the enclosures they are in now. The current main aviary is just under two acres now but the species are quite mixed. We want to turn this aviary into an Australian species only. This will take years to do. Plantings need to be changed, the South American and Asiatic aviaries need to be built, the south american and asiatic species need to be caught from the current aviary (and at nearly 2 acres in size and 7 metres tall that in itself is going to take awhile). We also want to remove the mutations that have been allowed in the aviary...again a hard task with the size of the aviary.

Our Emu's are almost ready to go on display and we will get cassowary further down the track. (we need to grow our rainforest first)

I guess at the moment we are more suited to the general tourist and not the aviculturist. However over time we will keep adding species that will get the aviculturists excited. (this is our background). We want to keep our main focus on birds. We will display a small number of Australian animals (at this stage we only have plans for kangaroo's and koala's) but we hope this will bring people in and they experience the birdlife and we hope they get excited about birds. We want people to have an upclose encounter with the birds without the wire.

And of course we will have raptors, and we will build a wetlands and we have started to expand into the non parrot/finch/dove species but again it all takes time. And whilst doing all of this, we want each visitor to have some interaction with us (the owners).

We want to keep the boutique family feeling. We want to be known as the bird place to visit. So we want feedback so we can achieve this. Though I am frightened if Hix comes to visit. ;) Seriously we want feedback, we want ideas about what visitors want to see keeping in mind our vision and our ethos. We are open to all ideas. We want people to talk to us so we can talk to them about our plans. We will take the website banner picture into consideration. Our branding is a green wing macaw, which we do have currently on display, so the stock photo was the only one that fitted the template with a greenwing in it. From this site, I have learnt a great deal. Our info signage is not what we want at all but due to the cost we are gleaming every bit of info about what zoo goers want in an info sign so we get it right the first time. And there is countless things I am not happy with but at the moment do not have the time or money to change and feedback with help us make the right decision the first time round. We are slowing getting to know other people in the zoo industry and we have found everyone really helpful and would appreciate it if other zoo owners/managers/keepers could make contact. Until now, I guess we have been a bit shy to come forward and we are still finding our feet in this zoo world.

So be patient with the Flying High Family. We have a lot of work to do but we are looking forward to it.

Now hopefully I have not broken a rule here and have posted off topic. Apologies if I have. I will start a new thread for feedback.
 
FLYING HIGH said:
That's exactly what it is until we can afford a proper website.
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What's wrong with the present website? Bar the hyacinth :p.
I think the site is great as is.
There is info on how to get there, opening times, cost of entry, a bit of history, a bit about the birds etc.
All looks well.

Thanks for your longer post about the park in general. I think you should start your own thread - not because you are hijacking this thread, but because your post is lost in here. A new and separate thread would probably get more readers.

I suppose that every zoo enthusiast is different, but there are probably a few general categories that we would all fall into. My wife and I fall into the category of the visitor who wants more animal interaction than the average person. Yes, it's nice to snap a great photo for Facebook with macaw on your arm, but just the thrill of touching and interacting with a pseudo-wild animal can be enough.

Let me give you two examples to illustrate my point. My wife and I visited the bird parks in Singapore (and in Kuala Lumpur). The Singapore bird park is absolutely awesome, and has almost any bird you can think of. They probably have a dodo off-display for all I know. Anyway, despite this, the only interaction we got with the birds was a conveyor belt, "queue up and get your picture taken" with some macaws on us that lasted about 30 seconds. We really were after more interaction, like in the huge lorrie aviary where you could buy a little cup of food and the lorries would come to you. Still, the experience was a bit underwhelming.

Example number 2 is a little fauna park in Kyabram in Victoria. There was a walk-in aviary about the size of my living room with a few sulphur crested, Major Mitchell, and Red-Tailed-Black cockatoos, plus a few galahs and rainbow lorrikeets. Nothing spectacular, but we enjoyed the experience more than the world-renowned Jurong. The reason is that the sulphur crested cockatoos were like pets. 100% tame, and you could cuddle them, pick them up, play with them etc the way you would your own pet. The Major Mitchells were less sociable, but you could at least pet them. There was a bench to sit in the aviary, and we spent at least an hour just hanging out with the birds and playing/talking to the cockatoos.

Anyway, we are after the latter experience rather than the former. It's not too meaningful for us to see birds in cages, or even metres away despite being in a free-flight aviary. But if we can interact with them, then that is something for us to specifically make a trip for. (As an example, we flew to Canberra for a few hours just to do the tour at their zoo to feed the tiger and lions etc.)

Well, I am rambling a bit, so let me try and wrap it up. At my ideal birdpark, I would like to be able to feed the birds (get them to come on my arm and I feed them, or they stay on their perch or hand railing etc), to pet them, and to interact with them. We like sociable birds, rather than the pseudo-wild experience where the birds are shy and you have to look through the leaves to spot a portion of their tail. We are parrot people, so parrot interaction is always preferable for us over emus say.

Anyway, that's just one category of zoo visitor. Maybe what we like is not feasible, maybe visitors and children would stress out a $5,000 macaw, maybe a sick person might throw stones at a black cockatoo and it would become shy again, who knows. You asked what we liked, and I told you. :) You would be in a better position than me to say whether a birdpark can ever have the level of interaction that we are after.

Cheers.
 
Flying High, thanks for the update about your park.

It seems that all good amateur naturalists (not the nudie kind) eventually become obsessed with birds. Certainly, my secret retirement dream would be to construct a bird park in Australia. Whilst lacking flamingos toucans etc, Australian aviculturalists, Do have enough of a diversity of species to maintain a keen interest and I think that Zoos have largely, though not entirely failed to take advantage of the avicultural offerings.

have you been to Jurong? i'm going assume that you have, but if not you simply must. I couldn't think of anything more likely to incite a wide range of inspiration in you than that place.

Lorikeet/Lory feeding aviaries are very successful and common displays in US Zoos. More often than not they call them "lory Landing" or something similar.

Likewise, nothing gets the public keener than a bird show. Have you been to Heallesville? their outdoor amphitheater houses arguably their biggest attraction - the excellent Bird Of Prey Show. They have built such a reputation for this they have recently extended its use for a equally excellent parrot show.

I have always been surprised that no Zoo has done a Grand scale Asian avairy. Tarongas various walk throughs comes close, and deserves a tick, but such is the variety of exquisitely colourful asian songbirds, ducks, finches, pigeons, parrots and pheasants in Australia, that one could (especially if using "filler" Australian species with asian distributions) easily stock something on the same scale as Melbourne Zoos Great Flight Aviary with Asian birds. That would be just spectacular.

likewise a walkthrough african finch aviary could be equally as busy and colourful. There must be well in excess of 20 species of african weavers, waxbills and the like here. I'm sure you have quite a few of them!

And lets not forget the penguins. Personally, I don't quite get the publics fascination with these guys, but there is no denying its alive and well.

anyhow, goodluck. Glad someone is living the dream.
 
there have been in the past though. Taronga used to have king vultures, for example (back in maybe the 50s or so?).
 
Other species of vulture; African and Asian were present and were housed at Taronga near the central seal/dolphin pools. I also have a reference that the aviaries built opposite Reptile World were originally a place where vultures were displayed.
Adelaide Zoo also had some exotic birds of prey including Bald Eagles in their collection, but these have of course all died out.
Given the perilously in-bred state that our Andean Condor population is currently in, its a good thing that these birds are simply so long-lived that the inbreeding process can be stalled and the population sustained. If no imports were allowed I would hate to see what our Condor population might look like in 2100. By then, they might be starting to produce defective pterodactyls :)
 
Chlidonias said:
there have been in the past though. Taronga used to have king vultures, for example (back in maybe the 50s or so?).
Click to expand...

The Great Flight Aviary at Melbourne Zoo used to be divided into about 6 sections before it was renovated in the '70's. The section at the end with the dome used to contain wedge-tailed eagles. But I have a very dim childhood memory of vultures in there too. Can anybody tell me if I am just dreaming? We are talking the '60's.
 
this won't help - I just thought it was interesting - but when the aviary was first constructed the zoo was seeking up to a hundred wedge-tailed eagles to display inside (I found that in an old The Argus article from 1940).
 
Just how old is the Great Flight Aviary - I was always under the belief that it was built circa 70s?
 
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