Ok, maybe it wasn't a full day... but we passed a lot more time at the Kuala Lumpur Bird Sanctuary than we were expecting... and definitely took a lot of pictures! The nice thing about this park is that most of the birds are free to walk and fly around. Obviously, it doesn't beat a forest, but it's better than seeing them in small cages at the zoo.
Since the birds are free to fly around, there are multiple opportunities to interact with the birds. In one of the areas, we got to feed sunflower seeds to the colourful parrots as they dangled all over our arms, shoulders, and heads, while squabbling with each other for the seeds.
The funny part was after Jen ran out of seeds, one of the bigger birds tried to eat her watch… it seems the yellow button looks like a kernel of corn!! Luckily, the bird eventually gave up on trying to chew the plastic button, so it spit it back into Jen's hand and we will have to find some glue to re-attach it :).
Dom also had a bit of fun feeding the birds :) Given his latest luck with animal encounters (ie. the 2 rabies scares), he thought that he would probably get an eye poked out… but thankfully, it didn't happen.
We also watched the stork being fed fish - a pretty simple process where the keeper comes and dumps a bunch of fish on the ground, and the storks scramble to get their share. Once the fish ran out, one of the storks still wanted more.. it snuck up and tried to eat Jen's leg. Their beaks are fiercer than they look - it actually managed to leave a couple of decent sized bruises! When Jen yelped at the bite, the stork squawked back and they gave each other a glare.. the stork then backed off realizing that Jen wasn't going to let it try again.
A bit cheesy, but Jen loves playing with animals... so we went for some all out cheesiness - paying to take pictures of her with tamed birds arranged to perch on her. It was cool because they let us choose which birds to take pictures with. The handler put them on you and voilà… picture perfect! Jen chose 2 cool looking owls and got to pet their cute little heads after!
From weird chickens to ostriches, there is a lot to see and enjoy at the KL Bird Sanctuary. This may not be the most adventures thing we've done, but it was quite relaxing and fun.
