Bird Watching At The Largest Walk-In Aviary

While most of my travels involve visiting family or revolves solely around food, my 2014 Asia trip was more about animals and marine life. Well, aside from eating good food, of course! Good food is always a given. The two and a half week trip involved going to 2 aquariums, a huge zoo (plus their river themed aquarium), monkey feeding, firefly watching, and the highlight of this entry -- KL Bird Park, the world's largest walk-in aviary.

I've never been the biggest fan of birds, but it happened to be on one of the 23 stops for the Hop On Hop Off tour bus in Kuala Lumpur. It was a plain touristy thing to do, but ths bus extremely convenient and relaxing after all the planning we did over the past week and a half. We got to see a majority of the city's main touristy things in a day and ticked off both the aviary and aquarium!

This was our bus. We sat on the top section and sweated in the sweltering heat sans air conditioning to get a better view of the city.

The Kuala Lumpur Bird Park in Malaysia

The place is huge and filled with a lot of green. With over 20 acres of space, it reminded me of the Singapore Zoo, with all the birds just hanging about in areas reminiscent of their natural habitat. The humidity too, oof.

(map via Kuala Lumpur Bird Park website)

The park has 2 zones for free-flight birds, while zone 3 is the Hornbill Park and zone 4 is the caged/small aviary area. There was so much to see -- this blog barely covers even 15% of KL Bird Park.

From behind the relaxing waterfall:

While it looks fairly empty in the first two pictures, just know that there are birds EVERYWHERE. It takes more time to find an area without birds than to find an area with them. Actually, if you look closely you can see a group of them hanging about on the walkway!

Most birds were pretty active and generally looked happy, but sadly this doesn’t apply to the birds of prey, which were all locked up in rather small habitats.

According to their website, the aviary houses over 3,000 birds from around the world... but I didn't expect to see some free roaming monkeys?

There is also a pond filled with kois that would swim up to you excitedly if you peer over the edge:

We saw some signs for emu feeding. Turns out, there was just a pail of vegetables sitting on a counter right outside the emu enclosure. Feed at your own risk, it seemed like. The emu stuck its head through the cage and literally snapped the long leafy greens out of our hands. Good thing we were holding them by the ends of the stalks! With such an intense gaze, Emus are definitely a bit more intimidating than I thought.

Feeding the lorries were a bit more tame, despite being swarmed by them:

The birds don’t mind if you get too close to them. I even got this shot:

At some point a milky stork tried to run down the stairs and slipped. It got up, pretended nothing happened, and slowly walked away. Haha. Others were much more majestic, like this egret:

For those looking for any fun touristy pictures to take, there is a photography area where park guests can pose with a couple owls of their choice for a small fee. The owls were sleeping (spot the one that isn't) and there were no staff around, so we couldn't take one. They didn't look like they were bound to the area by any means, so for a while we weren't sure if these birds were even real!

And look at this cuteness we found. They were crossing the path as we were making our way out of the park. I fumbled with my camera trying to get it out of the bag, so this was the only picture I was able to get:

Lunch time at the Hornbill Restaurant & Café

All the walking and bird watching had us parched and ravenous by the time we finished. We were too hungry to venture out to find food -- the buses ran in 45 min intervals and we simply couldn't wait. I don’t remember what I got, but it was just okay. The lychee tea, which initially sounded and looked really good, was also a bit disappointing with its lack of flavor. But I mean, what would I have expected? We sat indoors to escape from the humidity outdoors, but those who choose to dine outdoors on the veranda can enjoy the company of birds.

After eating, we hopped back onto our KL Hop-on/off bus to our next destination, KLCC Aquarium for their 4pm daily Piranha feeding! Stay tuned for the upcoming blog.

Featured Image: Milk Stork At KL Bird Park Admission: 50RM for Adults, 41RM for kids age 3-11 Hours: 9am - 6pm daily Transportation: KL Hop-On-Hop-Off Bus -- Station No. 15 in front of KL Bird Park Main Entrance. Buses available every 30 to 45 minutes.

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Bird Watching At The Largest Walk-In Aviary