palm squirrels at taronga » Taronga Zoo

palm squirrels at taronga
12-09-2006

last week was great for me. i went to taronga zoo on the monday and melbourne on friday and sunday.
has anyone had the chance to go to taronga lately? i dont know if it was spring, the approaching 90th birthday celebrations or just the fact that it was a beautiful day but the zoo was honestly the best i have ever seen it look.
there is a new exhibit of palm squirrels in the jungle cat enclosure and the lion enclosure has been redevloped to better reflect their wild grassland habitat.
to highlight the 90th birthday celebrations a great range of signage has been devised contrasting the zoo of the future with that of the past at over a dozen landmark enclosures and buildings across the site. also, the elephant temple has been renovated and turned into a heritage museum-all about elephants.
the old safari lodge building has been turned into an interpretive centre for the two zoos conservation programs, history and collection. i especialy liked the way the signage highlighted the importance of integrated partnerships with in-situ projects and wildlife agencies. if all you knew about zoos was what you got from the news snippets crowing about how an endangered species birth was saving a species, than you could accuse zoos of simplifying conservation and blowing their trumpet a bit too much.
on the other hand this exhibition seems to give average zoo visitors an insight into how complicated and at times critical ex-situ conservation really can be.

12-09-2006

wow sounds great, i am hoping to go at end of year onmy way back from foster, so i hope to see all that kool stuff, thou i am getting very excited about my melbourne trip, i carnt wait!!!!!

12-09-2006

Ill BE AT TARONGA ON the birthday day-i think its saturday the 7th of october. it should be good. what im also looking forward to is-besides the elephants arriving-is the great southern oceans exhibit opening. its gonna be huge.

12-09-2006

wht? is tht finished already, and the paper said they arnt gonna b here till november

17-04-2008

(This is an old thread, but I'm gonna drag it up again.)

Palm squirrels were running around in large numbers at Taronga and nearby Ashton Park when I was a kid (back in the dark ages), the result of escapes. There don't seem to be too many now.

However, they occasionally come up for sale in pet and bird shops in the Sydney area, totally illegally, of course. (The powers-that-be would like to stamp them all out. Anyone caught selling them is liable to a large fine.) They are the descendants of the Taronga animals and would be very inbred by now.

18-04-2008

or the descendants of perth animals. they still live wild there and i wouldn't be surprised if people caught them and brought them over to the east coast. i haven't seen any advertisements for them for years.