The Melbourne Takeover: Exploring the Healesville Sanctuary...

Sorry this post is a few days later than I said it would be. Busy days. But a lot is going on here down under. In fact, I'm going to a concert tonight that I look forward to posting about!

This past Saturday, I, along with the Loyola group and other international students, had the opportunity to visit the Healesville Sanctuary. Healesville is a conservation effort in Healesville, Victoria, AUS that keeps only Australian wildlife in efforts to preserve and breed their species.

Now, I'm a city girl, and, to be quite honest, I didn't really appreciate nature before. I would always say that being outdoors just wasn't my thing. However, my love for the environment has grown after working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife at their headquarters office these past two summers. FWS actively works on conservation efforts of animals throughout the world, and it's been an awesome experience seeing what all the agency does. So, when I heard that we would have the opportunity to see Australian animals, I was very excited!

It was about an hour bus ride to the Sanctuary. When we finally arrived, we were escorted to a picnic area for a quick lunch. Our first brush of wildlife was with a sacred ibis (which the Sanctuary is crawling with!). Now the Sanctuary does have closed off sections to keep the animals in place. However, parts of the area are open and, if they really felt adventurous, kangaroos and some other animals could venture out of their holding areas. Of course, with birds, a good number of them obviously are free to fly around wherever they please. So we were eating our lunch, when a sacred ibis (not a small bird in the least bit! LOOK AT IT!) decided to drop through for a little nibble at some crumbs on the ground. It was kind of scary at first, because I didn't expect it, and its beak looks like it could do serious damage if provoked, but it didn't pay us any mind really. So we all took pictures while it ate, walked around, and then eventually went on its way. Good times.

Our next stop were the kangaroos.I had seen that some of the Loyola kids who came to Australia last year around this time had gotten to take pictures close to them. I was hoping to do the same, but the kangaroos were lying around, very to themselves. And I was actually going to overlook the fact that apparently they're not all that nice and try to take a picture with them. *Sighhhh* Oh well.

The Sanctuary had so many other beautiful animals. We saw the Tasmanian Devil (How they got Taz from Looney Toons from this animal, I will never know. Absolutely NO resemblance.), as well as the brolga, which is Australia's national crane. We saw a few dingoes, relatives of the wolf, emus, pelicans, and of course, those cute, "cuddly" (But supposedly a little dangerous. Sorry to burst your bubble) koalas. Not koala bears. There is absolutely no relation between the koala and a bear. But they were really cute. And lucky for us, we caught a few of them up and moving. (Koalas sleep about 20 hours a day!)

We also got to visit the Sanctuary's health center, which, of course, deals with illness of the animals, nursing them back to health. They also help reintroduce some of them back into the wild. They had mock up exhibits of what the different rooms looked like to deal with emergency care, recovery, and more.

All in all, it was a great experience! I would love to go back! Check out some more pictures below! I might add a video from my phone on a later post, depending on how good of a quality it is.