Animal Diaries Archive

Roma The Major Mitchell

7 January 2005

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had wonderful celebrations and are all looking forward to a new and prosperous year ahead. The Christmas period has been exceptionally busy for us.

With a full stadium in the Crocoseum, all the birds are enjoying the excitement that a large crowd brings. With all the ooh's and ah's, the birds and even more so, the parrots and macaws put on a fantastic show as they all get revved up by the crowd. We started the year with the addition of a couple young lorikeets which Bretto and his team bred up in the Rainforest Aviary. These little fellas will shortly join Oscar and Elmo in the Crocoseum. This will give us 4 lorikeets to use in the show, but we want more. Because the lorikeet is such a small bird we need to compensate with larger numbers so that everyone around the Crocoseum gets to have a good look at these little rippers. A larger flock will also help to get them really excited and they should all fly together in flock formation (in theory anyway) zipping and diving their way around the Crocoseum.

The young Major Mitchell Cockatoos are also in the shows now. With the addition of these two we are now starting to get up quite a flock of Australian Natives out each day. The Australian Natives are a great aspect of the show because they allow the Zoo guests to get a good close look at some of the species that are in this country which are suffering from habitat destruction/loss Australia wide. They put a smile on peoples faces when they glide by and hopefully this also puts a message in their mind about how important it is to conserve Australia's natural bushland, to help save these and all other Australian native animals.