Australia Sydney Get-together: 2nd July 2011, Symbio Wildlife Park

Given I've never been to Symbio and can't suggest where to actually meet - how are we going to find each other?

 

I've created a Meetup Everywhere page for ZooChat:

ZooChat Meetups Everywhere - Meetup

... and our first meetup at Symbio is here: ZooChat Meetup - Sydney, Australia | Jul 2, 2011 - Meetup

Anyone can create a new meetup in their local area (anywhere around the world) using this site! I'll integrate it into zoochat.com when I get a chance.

 

I've created a Meetup Everywhere page for ZooChat:

ZooChat Meetups Everywhere - Meetup

... and our first meetup at Symbio is here: ZooChat Meetup - Sydney, Australia | Jul 2, 2011 - Meetup

Anyone can create a new meetup in their local area (anywhere around the world) using this site! I'll integrate it into zoochat.com when I get a chance.

 

I'll be coming from the Lower North Shore, so if anyone needs a lift I can probably swing by and pick them up on the way. Normally I'd take the harbour tunnel / eastern distributor, but I could go via Lane Cove Rd / King Georges Rd instead.

I don't think I'd want to go much further west than Ryde though - too far out of my way.

Let me know if that helps.

 

Hey Sydney ZooChatters, it would be great if you could sign up for a free Meetup.com account and then join the Sydney ZooChat Community ... even if you can't make it to Symbio.

This will be a great tool for managing events in the future.

 

Thanks for the great day guys - was fantastic to finally meet Hix, boof, zooman and nrg800. I really enjoyed myself!

I'll upload some of my photos shortly.

 

For the benefit of those who couldn't make it - I thought I would post a more detailed "review" of this meetup at Symbio.

nrg800 and I arrived just before 11am (after setting off from the Lower North Shore at around 9:30am !!) ... and were shortly joined in the car park by boof and zooman. I was impressed that zooman had travelled all the way from Melbourne for this meetup - but he was also visiting the National Zoo & Aquarium in Canberra as well as Mogo Zoo on this trip, so it wasn't a completely crazy thing to do Hix joined us soon after 11am and we headed in to Symbio.

First port of call was the Crocodiles and Goannas, with Hix and myself taking a lot of photos on our DSLRs and some of the others taking a few photos with compact cameras.

We headed down to the Red Pandas in time for feeding and got some more nice photos before wandering past the Spider Monkeys (who didn't look particularly happy), the Mini Ponies, Cattle and Llamas. We stopped to have a bit of a look at the Birds of Prey and had a discussion about mesh materials used in aviaries.

After berating me about my (self-acknowledged) lack of knowledge about Australian ducks while passing the waterfowl pond, we bypassed the Kangaroo walk-through and emus and headed to the Echidnas.

We were very surprised to find an albino echidna with very few bristles and stopped for quite some time to get some photos and discuss the parts of an echidna you normally wouldn't get to see (like a tail!).

We headed back to the new Sumatran tiger exhibit just after feeding time and got some good photos. Simon and Hix got a case of lens-envy when a girl who had a Pentax DSLR with a 150-500mm Sigma lens showed us some of her photos. We told her about ZooChat - hopefully she'll sign up and upload some of them!

We spent quite a while in the Australian birds walkthrough aviary, talking and getting squawked at by the Ringneck parrots.

Next was the Marmoset & Cotton Top Monkeys, the Meerkats and the Reptiles.

By this stage we were getting hungry and boof had to head off to work, but we decided to get a group photo and managed to track down camera-girl to take a photo for us (at which point I think it was Hix who pulled out a tiny Canon IXUS camera for the shot - which we all thought was rather ironic given the previous comments about lens size!).

We eventually made it to the zoo shop at the exit and a couple of us stopped to buy small items before we discovered the director of the zoo, John Radnidge and stopped to talk to him for about half an hour. John was very gracious in answering all our questions and was obviously very proud (rightly so!) of what they had achieved at the zoo in the past 10 years - culminating in the recent opening of their Sumatran Tiger enclosure.

Eventually we managed to get ourselves away from the zoo and the four of us remaining agreed to head down to Thirroul where we stopped for a very late lunch and a few more hours of talking about zoos, ZooChat, import and export rules, and many other interesting things.

We finally headed our separate ways just after 4pm, with Hix heading off to visit family nearby, zooman heading towards Huskisson for the night before visiting Mogo the next day and nrg800 and myself driving back to Sydney - where we arrived back just after 6pm.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable day - I was pleasantly surprised by Symbio Wildlife Park and I had a great time getting to know some of our ZooChat members and sharing our passion for zoos and animal conservation!

 

but he did mention camera-girl twice, so it evens out