Steve, With the dam now being half full do you plan to add any water plants and fish species?, you may get a few frog species move in too.
It will take a while yet for the water to "settle" and we anticipate more water from rainfall during the spring and summer. We are grassing the earthworks first and will then add water lillies to act as cover for fish and amphibians. Frogs are everywhere at the moment, the Alligator pond is very vocal and frothing as are the duck ponds!
No MARK. The swans have their own pond - they are not into sharing! However they currently have 4 eggs so they may have a family to share with soon!
The Maremma seems to have done the job with the foxes but I'm running out of bullets on the damn feral cats!
In the days of the Tower of London menagerie a couple of hundred years ago, visitors wanting to see the lions were required to bring a cat to feed to them. Maybe you'd better bring that system back! (It just occurred to me that I'm typing this with my daughter's cat sitting on my lap. BAD Ara! BAD Ara!)
I like this ^^^^ pet cats alone are responsible for e deaths of an estimated 90 million native Aussie animals each year, there are around 3,000,000 pet cats in Aust. The number killed by feral cats is much higher. With an estimated 15,000,000 feral cats in Aust. As a country we suck at looking after our animals. Currently third worst in the world. Luckily we have Steve and our other zoos trying to help out.
third worst in the world at what? At "looking after our animals"? How can you possibly quantify that?
I thought Australia was the worst for the extinction of mamals. Mostly due to the introduction of cats and foxes which are very efficent at catching our small marsupials. I thought NZ was one of the worst for birds, due to many being flightless and having no deffence against small preditors.
Yeah, although the big predators wiped out a fair few too... Maori hunted all the big birds to extinction when they arrived, leaving the smaller ones for the mammals the Europeans brought with them. Not that the Europeans didn't wipe out a couple of species themselves through hunting... Not very on topic though
Australia has held first place for some level of extinction, it may just be mammals. There is still a bit of debate going on about where we sit, some say first some third. It is generally accepted that we sit in the top three for the rate of extinction in relation to the amount of time europeans have been settled here, as Australia's Indigenous people were very careful about the amount of plants and animals they took. This information was provided to me by a Phd Student studying the impact outreach environmental and science education programs have on students as well as a couple of papers I can post if wanted. Currently 19 Fish, 16 Frogs, 16 reptiles, 47 birds, 39 mammals and 612 plants are currently facing extinction in Australia. Cats alone are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of Aussie Wildlife. Anyway, off topic so if someone wants to continue this maybe we could have it moved to another thread.
Yep your right it's getting off topic guys I am sure there will be some DDZ news sooner rather than later
Barely We had 107mls to 6am today and another 93mls between 6am and 1pm. The contractor who built the waterhole dam was here this afternoon and said that he has never seen this sort of rainfall - and he has lived here since 1945! All the roads to the zoo are now blocked by floodwaters, landslides and/or fallen trees. Within the zoo most of the paths have been eroded, all the ponds are overflowing and the waterhole dam wall is eroding. That last bit is a bit scary. Fortunately, all the animals are doing fine. Our tigress was sitting in her pool today with the rain pouring down on her! The lions just love the mud they are creating but, strangely, the pelican has had enough and spent the afternoon sulking in the downpour. The zoo will be closed again tomorrow as the paths are not safe for visitors. It's not the best time of the year to get a Bobcat hired to fix them but we'll see how we go and hope to be open again on Wednesday - weather permitting. Thanks for asking.
Well Im glad you guys are hanging in there! heres hoping it stops soon so you can at least make use of the end of the school holidays! I shall have to come and see this tiger of yours once the water goes away! Take care and good luck
