Dubbo's Western Plains Zoo has become well known for some of the big game animals it is trying to help breed.
It was late 2020 and we were trying to head to Sydney to visit family. However, with the Covid travel restrictions in place it meant we had to change our plan, so we used the opportunity to check out some different places.
These sculptures were all over town. They sell these to businesses to create a tourist trail and help raise money for the rhino breeding program.Dubbo is a pretty big country town. Neat and tidy, I just love the wide streets.Taronga Western Plains Zoo, Dubbo (site map by the Zoo).
It's a pretty big place. We walked almost 10km. It took all day and we still didn't see everything. They do have options to bring your car in or hire a bike but we were happy just cruising around on foot.
White Rhinoceros This animal is seriously big and impressive.They have 3 types of Rhinos there but we didn't get to see the Black and One Horned Rhinos.The Asian Elephants were playful and were in and out of the water.An Ostrich. Some of the enclosures were very big and had a mixture of animals in them like this one.Zebras. They're pretty fascinating to see in person with those wild stripes.Giraffes and their big house with very tall doors.Lucky for us a Lioness walked close by the protected viewing area that we just happened to be in.A cheeky Meercat was on patrol. We got to watch it while we ate our lunch.African Scimitar Oryx, with awesome horns.Giant and very old Galapagos TortoisesAnd there was an Australia section too. We don't often Echidnas in the wild, they're naturally quite shy creatures, so it was good to see this one scurrying across its enclosure. I needed a D for my parkrun alphabet, a totally arbitrary stat collection challenge. It's great for over enthusiastic parkrun tourists. To complete the challenge you need to run a different parkrun starting with each letter of the alphabet.The parkrun was a really nice, out and back course along the Macquarie River.After parkrun we headed to the nearby Mount Arthur Reserve hoping for a good view of the whole area.Unfortunately, even though the weather was fine in Dubbo, a short drive away, up the mountain, there wasn't much to see.Still it was a nice 2.8km hike, which took about 43 mins with 127 metres of elevation gain.Usually, we can only do an official parkrun on Saturday, except each country is allowed two special event days. Australia has Christmas and New Years Day. It so happened that in 2021 New Years Day fell on a Friday so we got two new parkruns done on consecutive days. One of the reasons we choose Dubbo was because Narromine Wetlands was just a half hour drive down the road. It was great for our parkrun stats but pretty heavy on the legs.Flat, gravel, out and back course with one little dogleg.A couple of locals in the wetlands.We managed a little exploring of the wetlands straight after parkrun. It was good to explore as you can miss a fair bit when you're running around the place.
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