Greetings friends and welcome to the last week of August. If you’re a kid reading this, sorry but the summer is over. It’s time to get those backpacks out and hit the books once more! If you’re a parent, Yayyyyyyyyyy school is back in and we can get our weekdays back! And so the cycle of life continues.
Speaking of life cycles, did you know that baby porcupines are born with quills? Yep they have quills at birth. Now luckily for a female porcupine these quills are soft like fur at birth and won’t harden until a few days after the baby is born.
A baby porcupine will hand out with mom until it’s old enough to defend itself. That’s usually around 6 months old. I kind of get the feeling that defending itself really isn’t an issue with 30,000 quills.
Speaking of quills, a porcupine's quills have barbs on the end of them. If you’re ever unlucky enough to get stuck with them, they will take part of you with them when you pull them out. Now there are animals that a porcupine has beef with. These predators have learned a little trick.
Porcupines have no quills on their bellies. Bobcats, cougars and fishers have all figured out that if you flip a porcupine over that it’s defenseless. Now as a human, I have no desire to flip a porcupine over, I am content with watching them eat bananas and be the chill little critters that they typically are.
You can see them eating bananas and being chill in this week’s video! We also have many more fun facts in the video. Talk with you all next week!
Greetings friends and welcome to this week’s blog. This week I just wanted to take some time to appreciate the avian denizens of Timbavati Wildlife Park. In the past we have looked at Emu and crowned cranes we have also taken a look at our penguins and kookaburra. When I think about it though, there is a collection of birds in the park that entertain serious birders and casual birders alike.
When you enter the waterfalls area, you are greeted by our kingfishers the kookaburra. The Eurasian owl and tawny eagle are in close proximity as well. We also have the cutest peach faced lovebirds you will ever see. When you look at the ponds directly across from them you can find our mallard ducks, lesser flamingos and siberian red breasted geese as well.
A quick jaunt through some of our award winning rock work will bring you to our penguin encounter which is home to some park favorites the south African penguin. This warm weather pair of penguins love basking in the sun and swimming in their pool. It’s kind of funny to mention the works warm weather and penguin in the same sentence. The truth is that there are a lot of warm weather penguins we just tend to think of them as cold weather fowl.
Now when you enter our woodlands area we have more of our larger birds and raptors. The second largest bird in the in the world is the emu. Ostrich is one, emu is two. I have stood toe to toe with both and let me tell you that when you’re eye to eye with the largest raptors in the world you don’t notice the couple of inches worth of difference between the two. Those are some large birds and if you don’t have a treat, don’t plan on hanging out with them for very long. The crowned crane and the greater rhea aren’t small birds either. The Woodlands area has a lot to offer in the way of birds.
With all of that said, you’d think that we would have more than enough birds to keep the worm population in check, we do but we aren’t done yet! The Interaction Area at Timbavati Wildlife Park has more birds than you can shake a stick at as well.
Our nursery areas have many many different species of birds in them. From the impeyan pheasant to the turaco. We have a lot of birds in the nursery area. When you step around the side of Nursery 2 you come to our macaw encounter. This always makes me feel like a pirate because the birds in this area will absolutely talk to you when you walk up. There are lots of clicks and whistles to be heard here for sure but its the occasional “HELLO” that will stir you until you figure out that it’s the parrots.
The crowned jewel of the interaction area and one staple of the interaction area in general is the parakeet encounter. In this encounter, you walk right into the enclosure and feed the birds directly. They come and land on your hand and peck birdseed off of a stick that you can buy in the park. It is a hit with everyone that steps into it.
I wasn’t able to put every bird that we have into this week’s video but there’s more than enough feathery fun in our park to entertain you and your fine family when you fly through out entrance! Talk with you next week friends!
Greetings friends and happy World Lizard Day! As you can see from today’s picture post, we are enjoying our monitor lizard and the entertainment that observing it brings. In 2015 Timbavati Wildlife Park took on the task of creating a Spider Monkeys Encounter. This new attraction gave our guests a prime time view of our primate pals.
In 2016 we welcomed the birth of our first spider monkey baby. Spider monkey females will only hare one baby every two - five years. Needless to say baby was a hit. This led my desire to want to know more about spider monkey younglings.
First let’s begin with what a baby spider monkey is called, a baby. LOL yeah there’s no special name given to baby monkey’s, they’re just called baby or an infant. The first 10 weeks or so of an infant’s life is spent clinging to mom’s belly or being carried on her back. After that the baby will begin to adventure away from mom towards independence. The baby will nurse for up to two years.
This week’s video takes a look at our own spider monkeys and has a little bit of a surprise in it for you our friends. Thanks for reading and we will talk with you next week!
Greetings friends and welcome to international Sea Serpent Day! We don’t actually have sea serpents at Timbavati Wildlife Park so we’re probably not going to cover too much of that. Happy day nonetheless. What we do have though is a beautiful Interaction Area and in it lies one of the crown jewels of our park, the animal nursery.
We have talked to you about the nursery but I don’t think we have dug too deep into nursery building number 2. We didn’t cover it much last year because as you can see from this week’s video, it was under construction all last year.
This year we have a newly renovated building that is open for business. The first thing I thought about when I took my cameras into the building was “my goodness it’s dark in here.” This lighting is all wrong for the look, so I went and asked our owner Alice Schoebel about the lighting. Now if you don’t know, Alice is as knowledgeable as she is kind. There isn’t an operation in the park that she doesn’t have the intimate details on. Luckily for me, this question was easily answered.
Nursery 2 was designed to be dimly lit because its intended purpose was to house the nocturnal denizens of Timbavati Wildlife Park. That’s right, our owl monkeys and our fennec foxes, fruit bats and the like all dig the dimly lit facility.
I think the best part of the facility is watching how these smaller animals all take the mouldings in the walls and turn them into comfy perches to hang out in. They find some pretty creative spaces to be in.
Well that’s all we have this week, if you haven’t been to the park yet this year, check out this week’s video where you can see a little before and after on nursery number 2.
