Australia Day 7: Blue Mountains Part 1: Fauna

This morning we had scheduled a tour to the Blue Mountains. We ate breakfast in our hotel...I had porridge (that's Australian for oatmeal). We walked up the block from our hotel to the Four Seasons (the one with the elevator) to get on our tour bus. The Four Seasons is a hot spot for tour bus pick-ups. There were about 4 buses that came and went, but we weren't on any of their lists. Finally, our bus came. Turns out, it wasn't our bus at all. It was just a bus to take us to our bus.
Once we switched to our Blue Mountains bus, our guide and bus driver (I think his name was Chad) took us to the Featherdale Wildlife Park. Along the way, he told us about Rugby League and Australia Rules "Football", the names of rivers and towns, hail storms that killed 2 wallabies, beer, tolls (you pay $2.20, but if you save your receipt, you get refunded $2!), voting (a $50 fine if you don't), spiders, the population of Sydney. He was full of facts! I brought my knitting project on the bus with me, but I spent the whole time writing down everything he said in my little notebook.
The Featherdale Wildlife Park is for rescued animals. They help them out there until they can go back out in the wild, and then they release them if they can.
This, uh, friendly looking bird caught David's eye right away. That David is a real daredevil. I prefer holding sweet koalas, but David, who hadn't expressed an interest in holding the cuddly little bears, wanted to hold this wild-eyed animal. (It's a Tawny Frogmouth) It looked like it might snap his nose off at any moment.

Of course, my heart belongs to this little guy:

He was napping, so I couldn't touch him, but luckily there was another koala waiting for me!

Don't we make a sweet little family?

Then we picked up an ice cream cone full of kangaroo food and went to feed some animals!

Did you know that when a kangaroo is born it's the size of a jelly bean?
Feeding the kangaroos here was not as serene as feeding the kangaroos at the Australia Zoo. Perhaps it was the giant creepy birds roaming freely:

I felt a little bit bad for them, because I figured probably a lot of people didn't feed them because they just weren't as cute as the kangaroos. Kind of like the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree. I love that little tree. But there was no way I was going to feed that big creepy thing. So I made David do it.

And would you believe that the big stingy bird stole the whole ice cream cone right out of David's hand. No wonder nobody wants to feed those emus. Score: David 0, Creepy Giant Emu 1.

After the feeding portion was over, we walked around looking at the other animals:

The cute little penguins. They were having a blast in their pool.

This funky looking chicken. The strangest chicken I've ever seen.

Baby dingo pups. They look just like regular dogs.

A big ugly croc.


A bird as big as me.

The Yellow-Footed Rock Wallaby. He's endangered.

That was pretty much all of the Featherdale Wildlife Park, and good thing, too, because our time was about up. We had to go back to the bus to go to our next stop, which I really hoped was lunch.