Bali Bird Park

Our fifth day in Bali was mostly spent in photography subject-specific places; we started off in the early morning at the Botanic Gardens in Ubud for macro flower photography, then continued onto the Bird Park for animal photography, then the Bali Hyatt Gardens and Sanur Beach, before finishing the day at Tegenungan Waterfall.

The highlight by far of the day though was easily Bali Bird Park. This park was opened in 1995, and has 1500 birds of 250 specifies from Bali, Lombok, Indonesia, Africa, Australia and the Americas.

This place had been on and off our “To Visit List” largely because there were still a lot of things we could do, including spending the last full day just stoning at the villa, or wandering and visiting the hundreds of artisan shops in Ubud town, or checking out Kota. Moreover, it was hard for me to imagine any bird park in the world being as magnificent as the Jurong Bird Park.

And boy, were we so wrong about that. In a word, the Bali Bird Park is amazing. In terms of sheer size and variety of bird specifies, I’ll haphazard a guess that the Jurong Bird Park is perhaps at least 6-7 times larger than the Bali one. Heck, the aviary in the former alone is possibly the size of the Bali Bird Park already.

What’s amazing, however, about the one we spent several hours at yesterday were three aspects.

Firstly, its compact design. The exhibits are placed fairly close together with little waste of space. Jurong BP while huge in its land area has exhibits that are spaced pretty far apart. We were at the Bali BP for just over 2.5 hours and never felt rushed for time as we moved from exhibit to exhibit.

Secondly, the bird keepers were wonderfully friendly, and even enthusiastic about encouraging visitors to interact with the birds. It seemed as though every couple of metres or so there would be keepers cheerfully nudging for us to take pictures with birds perched on us.

Even more thrilling was while we were having lunch at the park’s restaurant, we had a short 15 minute show right in the restaurant itself. The picture of Ling and myself here’s taken during the show while we were having Pizza & Tomyam.:)

Oh yeah; notice the green and yellow parrot lying on Ling’s palm? He’s plays dead when you say “Abacadabra” to him.:)

The most impressive aspect of the park however was how close we could get to the birds. Many of the birds are free roaming in the park, including dozens of peacocks, pelicans, doves, pigeons, parrots, macaws, hornbills etc. There was a peacock strutting around right at the entrance, and so wowed visitors just getting into the park that there was a bit of a congestion right at the entrance there.:)

The two lovely fellows in the first picture were too in a couple pose, and actually looked amused as I stood half a metre from them to take this picture! The two of them looked so romantic as they necked each other, and shared a bite of a biscuit. It was possible to even stroke them gently.:)

The other picture of Ling here with five birds perched on her was taken inside an aviary. The keeper got her to hold the small metal bowl of a honey mix, and it didn’t take long for several birds to hop whatever free space they could on her.:)

The one downer of the place though is its ticket price. At USD17 per adult, it’s a major *ouch*! The Jurong BP admission ticket is USD13 in comparison. That said, the Bali BP admission gave a 20% discount for visitors who’d flew Singapore Airlines in Bali, so that helped a bit. Moreover, the price of the ticket included admission into the nearby smaller but as impressive reptile garden. We were however running short of time so we didn’t spend too much time at the garden.

So, in all, it was quite a memorable visit that’s easily worth the high price of admission, and we really recommend visitors to Bali to bite the expensive bullet and give the park a try. We took about 350 pictures, many of them turned out well. A small selection are right here in our Flickr album.:)