The Nordic Ark, July 12th 2008. Part 23

The path wound on through the beautiful woodland. We were all just having the best time. And so looking forward to whatever else lay in store for us (we were given maps of the park at the entrance but we mostly just put those away and followed the path ... to see what we would see :-).

(Left-right: C., trilltrall, KAS)

The next enclosure held another bird - the white-winged woodpecker (Dendrocopos leucopterus). The Ark has one of these as far as we could tell. S/he was sitting on top of (one of?) its shelters, sunning itself and occasionally ruffling its feathers and grooming them. It was pretty close to us and definitely noticed us standing there watching it. But it seemed perfectly calm and relaxed and not at all stressed. The enclosure was very much a piece of natural forest. Beautiful. :-)

Across the way from the woodpecker was an enclosure for the European wildcat (Felis silvestris silvestris). The park does have a couple of these, and we were very interested in seeing them - KAS and C. especially ;-) - but we honestly weren't really expecting to. Again, it was the middle of a warm and sunny day and although they are mainly diurnal they do have thick coats ... we expected them to be avoiding the heat and dozing in their shelter. And that's probably where they were - we didn't see so much as a whisker of them. :-)

Their enclosure looked great though.

There were a couple more animals that they do have that we didn't see. Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) was one and Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) the other. The former I don't think we really expected to see - they are nocturnal and it was a bright sunny day - and the latter, well ... I think we were too eager to go see the leopards to wait around long enough for the otters. :-) They're cute, but the leopards were a more eagerly anticipated attraction. :-)

On the way there we passed the enclosure containing the Moluccan cockatoos (Cacatua moluccensis), but they were all inside and hard to see, so we didn't spend much time there either. I took one really lousy picture, not even worth posting. Maybe C. got a better one - if so I'll update this - but I doubt it. They were all inside their shelter and we could hardly see them. But we weren't there to see parrots anyway. ;-)

(Photo credit: third from top: C., others: me)

Update: No better cockatoo shots available, so I'll just have to skip those, even though we did see them. The picture I've got isn't worth showing anyone. :-)