It is definitely a tourist place - the feature that appeals most to the Japanese tourists is holding a koala and having your picture taken (this costs extra, but appears to be an included cost for the Japanese tourists we saw - their tour lead would hand them each a plastic chit as they lined up).
That sort of thing doesn't do terribly much for me, I prefer to look at the animals doing their thing. That's not to say that holding a koala isn't a koala doing its thing - they think of you as a tree and can stick their claws in quite firmly.
Echidnas don't tend to do much during the day - they sort of half-bury themselves, so only spines poke out. There was some excitement while we were there, though - a young park attendant was meant to be examining or weighing one echidna, and was being shown how to extract a half-buried echidna by another park attendant. (The secret is to be more patient than the echidna, from what I could tell.)
I do think this kind of place serves an important purpose - I've been out in the bush a fair bit, and I think I've seen one echidna in the wild, and I recognised it because I'd seen them in places like this.
It is definitely a tourist place - the feature that appeals most to the Japanese tourists is holding a koala and having your picture taken (this costs extra, but appears to be an included cost for the Japanese tourists we saw - their tour lead would hand them each a plastic chit as they lined up).
That sort of thing doesn't do terribly much for me, I prefer to look at the animals doing their thing. That's not to say that holding a koala isn't a koala doing its thing - they think of you as a tree and can stick their claws in quite firmly.
Echidnas don't tend to do much during the day - they sort of half-bury themselves, so only spines poke out. There was some excitement while we were there, though - a young park attendant was meant to be examining or weighing one echidna, and was being shown how to extract a half-buried echidna by another park attendant. (The secret is to be more patient than the echidna, from what I could tell.)
I do think this kind of place serves an important purpose - I've been out in the bush a fair bit, and I think I've seen one echidna in the wild, and I recognised it because I'd seen them in places like this.
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