The Giraffe of Timbavati Wildlife Park

Greetings friends and welcome to this week’s blog post. We hope you all had a fabulous Thanksgiving and a kick off to the shopping season. If you’re looking for a cool animal themed gift you can stop in at our gift shop any day at 11AM and 1PM. Those are also the start times of the two Timbavati Encounters that we run daily. This week we’re walking over to the Grasslands Area to take a look at our giraffes.

We actually have our giraffes available seven days a week on our VIP Behind The Scenes Tours. Giraffes are natives of Africa. The giraffe as you all recall is the tallest animal on the planet. The giraffe is an herbivore. It loves the acacia tree leaves. The giraffe doesn’t drink a lot of water, it gets most of its hydration from the leaves that it eats. It only needs to drink once every few days. We’re talking about 100 pounds of plants a day here.

Giraffes Make A Tower

A group of giraffes is referred to as a tower. Towers typically have 12-15 members. To assert dominance and hierarchy within the tower males or bulls will engage in necking. Necking is when they crash their heads and necks into each other in what appears to be a fight. Rarely is anyone hurt in this event and it ends with one bull choosing to walk away in defeat.

Now a giraffe can be as big as 18 feet tall. It also can run at speeds up to 35 miles an hour but only for short distances. Females give birth standing up and the baby enters the world with a solid drop. Within 30 minutes the calves can stand and are running within hours. LOL they grow up so fast.

If you want more cool giraffe facts watch this week’s video. For more awesome animal facts about other cute critters visit the blog area of our website. Enjoy your week and remember we have two encounters that start daily at 11am and 1pm. Enter through the gift shop! Thanks and we will see you in the park!

Timbavati Wildlife Park Gives Thanks

Greetings friends and welcome to the Thanksgiving edition of our blog posts. This Thursday is the holiday that encourages and reminds us to give thanks for the blessings that we have and how fortunate we are to be alive and have loved ones. We have a coat of snow and the season is in full swing and hopefully you are too.

We are thankful for you our guests, readers and followers. Your shares and encouraging comments are motivators for us to be the best professionals that we can be. Your constructive criticism are teaching tools that we learn from. Your compliments are our validations that we’re on the right path.

This year we’re thankful for being here. We’re still kicking is what our matriarch Alice Schoebel is a mantra of fortitude. We’re thankful that we’re able to still “kick it.” We’re thankful for our business partners in the Wisconsin Dells and beyond. Each year we set out to build a new and though some faces shuffle from time to time, the bonds of our partnerships are strong enough to thrive through changes in seasons and people.

We are also extremely thankful for the respect and trust that we have with our animals. Working with them isn’t an occupation, it’s a way of life. We’re very fortunate to do what we do for a living safely and comfortably. There is much for us to be thankful for.

Seasons come and go, so do people and animals. You know what doesn’t go though? A joyful memory, you know the kind that makes you smile when you think about it. I have a lot of those smiles in my mind from Timbavati Wildlife Park. If you don’t have at least one of those in your memory banks we’re now open year round. Come and build one today! Cheers have a happy holiday and we will talk to you all next week!

The African Penguins of Timbavati Wildlife Park

Greetings friends and welcome to this weeks blog. We had a little dustup of snow around here this week and that gave everything a great wintery look. I was feeling so great about seeing the first snowfall that I wanted to jump on Old Man Winter’s train and talk about a wintery animal or two. That took me to our resident penguins, Mama and Papa.

Those of you who have been reading our blog for a while will remember these two starring in the Wisconsin State Lottery “Pengwin” campaign last winter. So for everyone keeping score here, penguins = winter stuff, except when they don’t.

Our penguins aren’t the arctic circle “Happy Feet” style of penguin, no no no. We have the opposite. We have good old warm weather penguins South African blackfooted penguins to be exact. These penguins live on the coast of Southern Africa populating the shorelines and coastal islands with penguin colonies.

These penguins can swim at speeds of up to 15 miles an hour. They can also remain under water for well over 2 minutes, which makes them winners at the “watch me hold my breath” game. Penguins will also swim up to 30 miles to find food. Their dense feathers protect them from the chill of the ocean.

We have a bunch more penguin facts in this weeks video. If you’d like to learn more cool animal facts, come on in and see what we have to offer. We are open for guided encounters daily at 11am and 1pm. Just enter at the gift shop at those times. If you’d like a more intimate experience we can run VIP behind the scenes tours also. Check out this week’s penguin video and we will see you in the park!

The White Emu of Timbavati Wildlife Park

Greetings friends and welcome to this week’s blog post. The November air has a chill in it this week but the sun is shining and we don’t have any snow so I will take that. This week we’re going to check in on our very rare friends, the white emu. There aren’t very many white emus in North America and as far as we know, we’re the only park in the midwest with them on display.

This resident of Australia is the second largest bird in the world. It avoids living in dense forests, areas populated by humans and arid terrains. They have been spotted in deserts but they are much more common near water supplies. Emu are part of the Ratite family which include ostrich, rhea, kiwi, cassowary, and the recently extinct Moa.

With a top sprint speed of up to 30 miles per hour, the ability to stride 9 feet and a 7 foot vertical, the emu is a tough character to corral if you are a predator. The white emu is not an albino. Albinism is a random anomaly concerning the pigment of the skin. It also causes poor eyesight in the animal or person. The white emu has been bred to be white

A pair of emu will breed in the summer and a female can lay a clutch of up to 15 eggs at a time. When the female lays her eggs she wanders off and the father tends to the clutch. A female can lay up to 3 clutches in a season and sometime will lay her eggs in another emu's nest and let a surrogate father tend to the clutch.

The male stays with the nest for about 8 weeks, until the clutch hatches. In this period he rarely leaves the nest and as a result of this loses a lot of his fat reserves. The chicks are born "precocial" which means they are pretty well functional at birth taking only a few minutes before they take their first steps. I guess they don’t need any tummy time to get them going eh?

The summer may be over but we’re open all year round! That’s right, we have our Timbavati Encounters. This is a guided trip to the park that begins daily at 11AM and 1PM. Check out the details on our website. Thanks for taking the time to read our weekly blog and we will see you in the park.