Save the Colour at the Jurong Bird Park

The kid-friendly activities just keep coming!

Last Saturday, we were invited to Save the Colour at the Jurong Bird Park. This is an event organised by the Bird Park to be held in the weekends this June for everyone in the family to learn about avian conservation. For this, most of the Penguin Coast area has been transformed into an Origami Village where kids (and adults!) can learn fold origami items, which are meant to symbolise and represent avian habitats. As the village is “populated” with origami items, kids are taught that everyone can make a difference to saving the colours of our world.

I like origami and DD and Noey love the Bird Park so we were all raring to go!

So we were initially a little disappointed when it started to rain shortly after we arrived at the Bird Park. It was a good thing that the Origami Village was right at the front of the Park so we were able to dive right in and keep ourselves busy while staying dry.

There was also a face-painting station and a tattoo station which was a real hit with the kids around, and also a Post Office where you could write a postcard to be posted to any address in Singapore to share the conservation message.

On top of the Origami Village, the Bird Park is also a treat in itself. The rain in fact turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it was nice and cool for the middle of the afternoon.

We whizzed around in the monorail and stopped off at the Lory Loft, one of the Bird Park’s 4 walk-in aviaries. It was quite amazing to be surrounded by free-flying birds. Even more so when they realised that we had food in hand! We bought a cup of the special nectar mixture to feed the birds and they immediately zeroed in on us, hopping willingly onto our arms to get closer to the cup. I saw some visitors with the birds sitting on their heads and shoulders and was rather thankful that none of the birds tried to do that to me! Noey was quite fascinated by the Lories, though rather wary after one of them turned and gave him a little nip when he tried to touch it. Oops.

We weren’t able to trek to the waterfall (still the world’s tallest man-made waterfall) due to the weather, but instead decided to explore the World of Darkness (ie. the owl exhibit). Noey is quite fascinated with owls, and was excitedly telling us about the “massive owl” he saw. A few of the owls were indeed large!

After that, we were ready to leave, but Noey wasn’t! He kept insisting on seeing more, so since we were at the park anyway, we took a walk to see the Birds of Prey, the Hornbills and Toucans, and the Scarlet Ibises and other waterbirds. We then visited the Penguins in front where Noey was really tickled to see a penguin hop into the water in front of him and poop! I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing about this for a long while to come.

After all that, Noey was finally hungry enough to be lured away by the promise of lunch.

I think we’ll have to make a trip back to see more. The Save the Colour event is still on this coming weekend, so do go check it out.

Incidentally, I just realised that the Jurong Bird Park is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year! I didn’t realise it’s been around that long!