fuzzy - The Twilight Report

Tyler’s visit included three animal themed locations:

• Sydney Aquarium
• Featherdale Wildlife Park
• Australian Reptile Park

I suggested the Aquarium because Tyler likes sharks. There were lots of sharks. This worked out pretty well, but the place is damned expensive! Even more shockingly expensive than when I took Joe and Cicely and Brian there.

Featherdale was suggested by a friend of his back in the states who had been there when she visited Australia. I had never been there, so I was game. They had open bits where you could interact with the kangaroos, emus and koalas and feed them. I sort of fall asleep seeing these animals because I’ve seen them a lot! I’m not really into feeding animals either. I get really annoyed when I see people feeding sky rats (pigeons), and I’d just as soon leave feeding zoo animals to the experts. I tend to want to take people to Taronga Zoo for its superior location and view of Sydney Harbour or even better the Western Plains Zoo for its wide open animal spaces. If you want to see Australian animals though, Featherdale might be better that either of those two, as it focuses on them. When Lena and I went to the Western Plains Zoo, we skipped the Australian animals altogether. If I am going to see Australian animals I guess I’d rather see them in the wild, like when I was returning from Canberra one day at dusk by train and kangaroos were jumping away from the train. I’ve also seen Koalas and Wombats in nature. I guess I’d make exceptions for hard to find animals such as the platypus.

The Reptile Park was ripe for a return visit since it had been years since I’d been there. The biggest single enclosure is dedicated to a number of American alligators. I joked that Tyler came all the way to Australia to see American alligators. They had really good presentations of reptiles and of the endangered Tasmanian devil. During the reptile talk the presenter asked if anyone remembered when the Reptile Park was down in Wyoming. I did! The big yellow dinosaur and the rest of the park used to be parked right next to the Wyoming shops down the road. I even remember going once when it was there. There was also a rapping spider and fly in the spider hut. It was a little disturbing. Not in an “ew! Spider” sort of way but in a “what were they thinking” sort of way. The Reptile Park (or “snake pit” as we always call it) is sort of misnamed since they also have lots of birds, mammals and spiders! Things scaly and cold blooded are definitely their speciality though.

There was quite a bit of overlap. Each of the three had a salt water crocodile. The Aquarium and the Reptile Park both had a platypus, and Featherdale and the Reptile Park had Brolga. We decided that Brolga was the perfect name for a miniboss and should not be referred to with the article “a” as with Birdo (who, while she appears in many locations in SMB2 is an individual character, unlike the shy guys who are clearly many individuals). I suspect strongly, in fact that there is a complicated tunnel network connecting zoos all over Australia so that Brolga can pop up and be seen by visitors when necessary, without actually being more than one individual. This is the weird shit that Tyler and I come up with when we hang out, like pizza with donuts. Each park had its own animals that weren’t repeated as well, like the sharks at the aquarium and the alligators at the snake pit.

I am always looking and photographing the wrong things. One of my favourite zoo pictures is of a duck who wasn’t even a zoo animal, just happened to be bumming around the Brooklyn Zoo when we were there. He was sticking his head out of a hedge and looked like he was ready to yell AFLAC at us.