After many months of waiting, Zoos Victoria’s Carnivore’s Trail finally opened to the public on 19 December, but with high temperatures and thunderstorms forecast for the day, we decided to miss the opening and wait for more favourable weather. Attending the opening of Kangaroo Country the next day (20 December) was already scheduled, so we had to wait for Thursday 21 December to visit. Thankfully, the weather was suitably pleasant and things looked good for checking out Carnivore’s Trail.
As usual we arrived just prior to the gates opening. Once inside, we headed straight for Lion Gorge and the start of the Carnivore’s Trail. This magnificent new addition to Melbourne Zoo includes an incredible enclosure for the rare and vulnerable Snow Leopards. The photo below, made from 50 individual photos, is just one of the superb one-way viewing windows into their enclosure. The one-way glass in the viewing windows allows visitors to look into the enclosure without disturbing these beautiful cats.
While taking the photos used to construct the above image, we were lucky enough to have a chance to chat with one of the keepers who showed us a few photos taken on his phone of a snow leopard sitting right up against the glass. He also told us how the snow leopards enjoyed exploring the enclosure, especially around dawn and dusk, climbing all over the many ledges and scenting everything.
We wandered a little further on to the next set of viewing windows and noticed a keeper in the enclosure doing a little cleaning up, so we guessed that soon the snow leopards might be coming out. We quickly took another set of images to construct a panorama of the upper viewing windows:
Then we pointed the cameras at the gate to the night dens just as the keeper opened it up, setting one up ready to record video. We observed a set of paws walking in the back of the den and the excitement levels rose and the video recorder switched on.
Unfortunately, the snow leopard seemed to decide that the night den was more interesting and went back out of sight. Determined to get at least one photo of these cats prior to leaving, we settled in to wait. Luckily this allowed us to meet some lovely people, including the site manager for the construction of the enclosures who told us about many of the built-in features designed to limit the need for human interaction. These features include a set of tubes that can be programmed to release food for the leopards at random times or manually overridden as required. We also met a young woman who had recently completed Year 12 and become a Zoo Member as she was keen to study animal behaviour. We chatted for more than an hour, exchanging stories about the animals and our zoo favourites. Numerous zoo staff, volunteers and visitors came by and chatted as we continued to wait. Unfortunately, after nearly five hours of waiting we had seen nothing more than those paws in the den and our parking was about to expire, so we packed up the gear and headed home. Although we missed getting a photo this time around, we will eventually succeed in one of our many future visits.