Day 14 - The Tidbinbilla Sanctuary

Nate

Today was another adventure in which we got to see animals in the wild that we'd never yet seen. At the recommendation of our Australian partners, we went to the Tidbinbilla Sanctuary, which was just under an hour from where we live. Here's just a few of the animals we saw today.

The first of these I am quite confident is an emu. I don't believe there are very many birds in Australia that look similar to an emu:

As for the next one, it is clearly a rodent. This one may need some research. I called them the friendly rats, and there were certainly lots of them, and they were certainly not intimidated by humans.

Then we came upon wallabies, and for all I know, I've perhaps seen wallabies, and then just believe them to be young kangaroos, joeys. Now just to clarify, we were in a sanctuary with some rehabilitating food dispensers--wallabies don't just stumble upon oranges that are already cut up. 

Now Blake was almost as excited in his inquiry about these huge rocks that just seemed out of place as he was about the animals. He kept asking how they got here, and while I don't know a lot about how the last ice age affected Australia, I just pretended to be in Okotoks, and told him the story of glaciers and erratic rocks. 

Now comes the animals that entertained us for quite some time: the koalas. Elly loved that they moved nice and slow, and were never in much of a rush. She is clearly set on koalas now replacing sloths as her favourite animal in the whole world. 

This picture really does some justice as to just how calm this day was:

This picture is that of the black swan. Just when one is supposed to believe that they are a runt in a pack of cygnets (or is it spelt sygnets?), you learn that it is a recognized species; we saw quite a few of them.