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