Me and Zoo mobile animal show

Blue Mountains Gazette

WATCH:  Go behind the scenes at the Blue Mountains' own Me and Zoo mobile animal show to see some rare Australian animals, August, 2023

Transcript

00:00 We're here today in Woodford and we're really lucky Me and Zoo's Mark Grant is going to

00:05 give us a tour of the premises.

00:06 Hi folks, welcome to Me and Zoo.

00:09 We're going to go inside and show you some really fantastic animals.

00:12 I hope you enjoy the tour.

00:21 So welcome to Me and Zoo.

00:22 We're just about to take out our blue tongue, but it's a very special blue tongue because

00:27 it's an albino blue tongue.

00:28 We'll just take it in there.

00:37 So this one's an albino blue tongue, very rare in the wild.

00:40 Although it's called a blue tongue, it is a blue tongue, but it's actually got a pink

00:44 tongue because it's albino.

00:45 It lacks all the dark pigmentation in it.

00:48 Now in the wild, these are extremely rare, but unfortunately they don't last very long

00:52 in the wild usually because they stand out quite a bit.

00:55 They don't camouflage very well, so predators pick them off quite easily.

00:58 And Mark, I can hear a sound in the background.

01:00 Do you want to introduce us if someone wants to make himself known?

01:04 That's Ash, that's Ash our Bengal cat.

01:07 So this is Ash.

01:08 Now Ash is a Bengal cat.

01:10 It's a very special cat.

01:11 The original breeding went from a domestic cat crossed over with an Asian leopard cat.

01:16 So you can see the leopard markings on his fore.

01:21 He's a very special cat.

01:22 We love him for bits.

01:23 He's a big hit at the shows.

01:25 The kids love to pet him after the show.

01:28 And we usually spend a bit of time with the clients, letting the kids handle him because

01:33 he's a very friendly cat, but he's full of character as I said, and full of beans.

01:37 Here we have a black-headed poison.

01:41 And you can see why it's called, or she I should say, she is called a black-headed poison

01:46 for its very prominent black head we see here.

01:49 And the reason why they've got this, in the wild they can sit in an animal burrow, for

01:53 example, a little rabbit burrow for example, and just expose their head out into the sunlight

01:58 in the morning.

01:59 And because the head is black, it picks up heat really quickly.

02:02 So it heats the body up and gets them ready for the day.

02:08 Reptiles are endothermic, so they pick up the, they take on the surrounding temperature

02:13 of their environment.

02:14 So it lets them heat up really quickly for the rest of the day with minimum exposure

02:19 to other animals such as predators.

02:23 So this guy, she is docile as anything.

02:25 She's a really nice snake.

02:26 You can see the tongue flicking out there.

02:29 I'm going to pop her back in.

02:34 She's beautiful.

02:35 So this is a melanistic, hyper-melanistic black blue tongue.

02:44 It's actually the opposite way of the albino I just showed you, the albino blue tongue.

02:50 It's a normal eastern blue tongue, but it has too much black pigment in its skin.

02:54 So it makes it turn black.

02:56 If you ever see a, have you ever seen black panthers in the wild?

03:03 They're actually melanistic jaguars.

03:05 So they, they're actually a normal jaguars, but just too much pigmentation in them.

03:09 If you look closely at the fore, you'll actually darker, you'll see darker spots on the black

03:13 fore.

03:14 So they're actually, they're not their own species.

03:16 They're actually melanistic jaguars.

03:18 And this one is a melanistic.

03:19 We've got Clancy, the saltwater crocodile right here.

03:22 And this guy at the moment is quite tiny.

03:24 I'll just give him a bit of a wriggle there.

03:27 I'm allowed to keep this guy until he's 1.2 meters long.

03:30 However, most of that will be tailed, so it actually sounds a lot bigger than what he

03:33 actually will be in body.

03:36 At the moment, he's taking bits of chicken, beef, and a bit of fish as well.

03:41 So crocodiles are amazing.

03:42 They actually have transparent eyelids, which they can push across the eye and use it as

03:47 a pair of goggles when they're swimming on the water.

03:50 So they're very well adapted to hunting and swimming in Australia.

03:55 Meow.

03:56 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Category

Transcript

Recommended