Travellers Palms at the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary As you walk into the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary’s front gates, you can’t help but see our magnificent stand of Travellers’ Palms. These palms earn their name, not because, as a lot of people think, they spread out, rather, they provided water to travelers in need, fresh water at [...]

Since April this year the Cairns Wildlife Dome and partnering zoo, Rainforestation have been participating in the Wildlife Volunteer program.  Our other partnering zoo, Wildlife Habitat has been participating in this program for about 2 years already.  So far it has been a huge success with very positive feedback from the volunteers. They participate in [...]

Recently the Cairns Wildlife Dome participated in the ‘Threatened Species’ day at the Botanic Gardens. The Cairns Wildlife Dome, and our partner zoo; The Wildlife Habitat stood along side our competitors; Cairns Tropical Zoo and Hartleys Creek Crocodile Farm to raise a very important awareness of our very rare and endangered animals that are unfortunately [...]

Australia’s Wildlife Habitat. Wabal Wabal (meaning Butterfly) Dancers   The interaction between our Indigenous Trainee’s, International Wildlife Volunteers, Habitat Team members, visitors and animals is an amazing thing. This blog and movie is all about cross cultural contact between all the above and has come together via our involvement in the  ready to work program [...]

One of our main aims here at the Wildlife Habitat in Port Douglas is “Conservation through Education and appreciation”.  We do this in many ways but our successful Wildlife Volunteer Program is a main player. How does an operation that keeps animals in captivity do this you may ask? The main answer would be exposure [...]

If you look closely at the photo they have some honey, a plastic piece of pipe covered on one end with bark and leaves, some witchetty grubs and a camera ( still in the van). Talk about the best job in the world, I thought I had it until I met these two German film [...]

Even on those dull rainy days here at the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary, we still have enough butterflies flying in the aviary to make it worthwhile for people to come in. Winter has been especially hard for all the staff we have working in our breeding laboratory in that because it was so cold, most of [...]

All our caterpillars successfully went into the cocoon stage. We’ve got them hanging up, as you can see, in a large box, all of them able to access a rough surface so that they don’t slip as they pull themselves out of the cocoon. Unlike all our butterflies, we don’t need to provide a flight [...]