Visiting Kiwi in the Orana Wildlife Park in Christchurch, New Zealand

My kids and I decided to check out the zoo last week in Christchurch and found a delightful day in store! The zoo in Christchurch has extra options to feed lemurs, lions, and tigers for an extra fee of $30 a person. Thankfully, only the lemurs allowed kids under 16 years old and they had already been fed by the time we arrived! There were other options to hand feed giraffes for free, throw food to the rainbow trout, and watch the cheetahs, kiwis, and rhinos get fed that we did get to see and do.

But who are we kidding? The real creature that we had set our sights to see at Orana Wildlife Park was the Kiwi Bird. This is the national bird of New Zealand who has no breastplate and is flightless and only lives in this country. We had the unique opportunity to see two of these little guys get fed at 1:30 p.m. in a very dark area. It was interesting to learn there are 5 types of Kiwi birds and their biggest threat are pet dogs who get loose and chase after them.

Luckily, we also enjoyed all of the other beautiful animals in the park. They seemed to enjoy our visit too. There weren't too many visitors on the winter weekday we picked to go, so the animals came about to see us as we stopped by their areas. I loved seeing how large and natural the areas were that they had set up for each type of animal.