fota photo

Friday morning we woke up and it was whoa gross outside. According to the box on my Google homepage, it was supposed to thunderstorm and heavy shower all day long, so we decided that it was perfect weather to go to an outdoor wildlife park.

Fota wildlife park is not like any other wildlife park I've ever been to- it was mostly all free-range and animals roamed free, mostly behind fences, etc. but some of the animals could go wherever they wanted. For example, the lemurs mostly stayed on their island, but some came over to say hi and this one really liked Kym:



But from the beginning... we took a 15 minute train ride to Fota, which was weird because I didn't know that it was so close to where we lived. We started out on the monkey island walk, where there were lemurs (left), gibbons/baby gibbons (right), and squirrel monkeys (below).

There were a million other kinds too I don't remember all their names. I averaged about 740 pictures per animal, so when this one lemur came over to us with 2 babies on her back, my camera got a good workout. Actually I don't think I stopped taking pictures the whole time I was there. My favorite monkey was the gibbon baby who was adorable, but he was kind of far away on his island.



We passed by some seals, who were very boring, and so were the swans and ducks, who acted just like all the swans and ducks I've seen over the course of my lifetime. What was really cool, though, was the cheetah run. At 4 they let out 2 cheetahs and attached this dead chicken on a zipline, which flew across this stretch of land, where the cheetahs chased after it, mocking a hunt. It kind of reminded me of playing with Kobe (our cat) and trying to get it to attack the fake thing that we're bouncing around her face. The cheetahs would be really interested in the chicken as it zoomed past them, feathers and bobbing neck and all, but if they couldn't catch it then they lost interest. The zookeeper would then bring it back and zoom it past in the other direction, where the cheetahs would run and pounce again, until finally they caught it, and ripped it apart in a very not children friendly kind of way and then ate it. It was fun but the first chicken got ripped in half and the the little girl next to me was not a big fan of this. Fota, though, has raised over 100 cheetahs, who have been born in the park. It's apparently really hard to breed cheetahs in captivity, but since they try really hard to keep them in a natural environment, they have been really successful. The other really cool part of the park was the huge open are where giraffes, ostriches and zebras hung out and ate lots of grass . This one ostrich was crazy. It spotted us from a far and came charging. It really was kind of scary, because all that was separating us from the very intense ostrich was this little wooden fence. Luckily, it couldn't jump the fence (even though it tried), so it gave up the chase, and proceeded to just stare at us from a few feet away.
We saw a lot of other animals too, including this one called a 'mara' or something that is half guinea pig and half hare- from South America I think. They were cool, and very weird looking but definitely half rabbit half rodent (left).

Overall, very good day. And turns out the weather was beautiful the whole day. Goes to show that Irish weather is completely unpredictable and never follows the forecast.

Kym, Johnny, and me. I'm going to miss these roommates!! ...