Zoo time

One of the parts of the Christmas Hamper that we won was a pass for an adult and one child to Cairns Tropical Zoo so thats what we decided to do on Thursday - when we got there as we could show that we were residents of Cairns the rest of us got in at a 30% discount as well.
The zoo specialised in tropical species only - although not all were from Australia. Some of the displays having been living in the Northern Territory were not that inspiring, the crocs in particular compared to Adelaide River Queen and Crocodylus park were exceedingly tame but is was still very enjoyable if stinking hot!
There were the normal photo ops..

I stayed safely behind the camera for these!
They had the normal "Feed the Roos" but these were not anywhere near as interested as the ones at Billabong Sanctuary near Townsville, in fact they took a lot of persuading to actually eat anything...

But they were very gentle and approachable.
they also had the "Cuddle a Koala" option which again having already done it we didn't worry about. The Koala area here though was very much orientated towards a breeding programme and they had many more Koalas around, including this little cutie..

One of the parts that fascinated the children most though were the walk in aviaries, I am not a big fan of these but it did give the children a chance to see up close some of the birds that we get whizzing around the place. The kookaburras in particular were very obliging, I must admit I was very much taken with the wing colours of this Blue-Winged, the details of this you don't often get to see in the wild

Xanthe was also able to get this video of two of the captive Laughing Kookaburras reacting to a wild one as it flew over
http://youtu.be/eKttc_kks80