Experiencing Healesville and Phillip Island

If you are an animal lover then experiencing Healesville Sanctuary and Phillip Island are a must while visiting Melbourne. I really enjoyed Healesville Sanctuary because it gave me the opportunity to see all of the famous Australian animals, with the opportunity to get close up, without walking around looking at encaged animals all day. I also enjoyed watching all of the little penguins waddle around Phillip Island on their way to their burrows.

Phillip Island is a while away from the city and has a refreshing view. Phillip Island Nature Park is a non-profit eco-tourism attraction that brings in people from all over on a daily basis. The island is really all about conserving the wildlife. At one point a Bed and Breakfast and golf course took up a large part of the island but were removed to preserve the island and help provide a stable environment for the penguins. I was also surprised when I was walking across a path, after the penguins had come ashore, and I was stopped because the penguin needed to cross the path to get home to its burrow. The penguins come ashore in groups of thirty or so penguins. They always come up on the same part of the beach and take the exact same path home every night. Therefore, visitors cannot use cameras because the risk of a flash going off would disrupt the penguin’s eyesight making them very lost.

After the sun went down I really enjoyed watching the penguin parade. The penguin parade has been a tourist attraction for over eighty years. In the last twenty years more bridges and viewing areas have been added to the island to better protect the penguin habitat. As the penguins come ashore, the head ranger sits in his skybox and counts each penguin. When I was at Phillip Island the number was around eleven hundred.

Seeing all of the famous Australian animals at the Healesville Sanctuary has been one of the big highlights of my entire trip so far. The Sanctuary has a beautiful layout and really is a sanctuary, not a zoo. The first animal I went to look at, of course, was the kangaroo. The Red Kangaroo is the largest kangaroo species, which can hop an average of four meters. I really enjoyed watching the kangaroos. I saw a mother feeding her baby and a kangaroo going crazy over an itch on its leg. As much as I liked the kangaroos, I actually preferred the wallabies. A wallaby is really just a smaller kangaroo, but I found them very entertaining.

My favorite part about the sanctuary was that I got up close and personal with a koala named Benny. Koalas are “drunk” and sleepy for twenty hours of the day from eating eucalyptus leaves.   There are over 750 different species of eucalyptus in Australia but koalas only eat sixty of the types. Koalas eat about a kilogram of leaves a day. Interestingly, Koalas predominantly rely on their sense of smell to guide themselves as they have poor eyesight. At the sanctuary I also enjoyed the bird exhibit as well as seeing a baby wombat, which was much cuter than I had imagined a wombat to be.

Here is a bit of history about Healesville Sanctuary I learned during my visit. The sanctuary was built in the 1930s, during the depression. During this time the steam train was used to get to the sanctuary. The sanctuary has always been a place for people to come and appreciate the natural heritage of Australia. As World War II emerged the sanctuary struggled to survive, but being the first to breed a platypus in captivity kept the sanctuary afloat. In 1956 the Olympic Games were held in Melbourne and a new platypussary was opened. The platypus was by far the weirdest animal in all of the sanctuary. You could say that it is almost a duck and a beaver mix. The platypus can eat enough food to equal his or her own body weight in a day. They also have enough venom to kill a cat or dog. Before Europeans settled in Australia, the land the sanctuary sits on today belonged to the Wurundjeri tribe. Many of the types of trees used to make aboriginal shields and canoes from still stand in the sanctuary today. In the 1980s breeding programs for endangered animals emerged in the sanctuary.