Today, I went to Cook Park, to check out their Begonia House.

It’s a pretty nice place – I parked at one of the entrances, and this is the view that greeted me:

They had a lot of garden plots, often full of flowers.  I liked this one especially:

I’m not well-versed enough in flora to know what those are besides ‘pretty’.  But this where they keep the begonia display:

It was a pretty small conservatory, but it was packed with flowers and smelled amazing:

There were even some dangling from the ceiling:

I’m not entirely sure if they’re all begonias, but they’re all pretty.  The park also had some very tall trees – towering, really:

Behind this crazy tree is the aviary:

So I wandered over to have a look at the birds.  It was a pretty big aviary:

And that’s only part of it!  I took some videos of the occupants – first, this zebra finch:

 

Most of the birds were budgerigars – here’s some of them pecking at seeds:

 

They sure come in a range of colours, huh?  It’s funny to think that the original budgies were green and yellow, and all the other colour variations arose from breeding in captivity.

This is a sulphur-crested cockatoo and a long-billed corella doing…something:

 

I admit I have no idea what’s happening there.  They look like they’re talking to each other, moving their beaks like that, but it could easily be an aggression thing.  Who knows?  Well, ornithologists, probably.

I also spotted a duck foraging in one of the garden beds:

 

I’m not sure what it’s finding, but it’s clearly getting something tasty.  I wandered along the paths, and heard something screeching.  I couldn’t figure out why it sounded familiar, until I looked up into the trees:

Flying foxes!  I also took a video:

 

Yeah, you can’t really miss them, not when they scream at each other like that.  Remember that duck in the garden?  I soon found out where it came from – the duck pond:

A guy was feeding them from a bench – the ibis and pigeons came, too:

This is the hug tree – so-called because its branches seem to be stretching across the path to embrace the tree on the other side:

The fountain in the middle of the park:

Sorry to disappoint, but those streams are coming out of carved jugs – this isn’t a peeing fountain.

More trees and little garden plots on the way out:

I also stopped by Emmaville cottage, an 1850s prefabricated home originally from the property of Narrambla, where Banjo Patterson was born.  It’s marketed as the ‘birthplace of Banjo Patterson’, but the truth is, no one can really be sure if it is, because though we know he was born on the Narrambla property, there were quite a few houses on it, and he could have been born in any one of them.

The cottage:

They had little vegetable patches outside it:

I particularly like the tomatoes.

This is a photo of a photo – what the cottage originally looked like:

When it was moved in from the nearby property, the outbuildings were so badly damaged they couldn’t come with it, hence the much smaller cottage today.

Inside the cottage:

You can see where they’ve had to replace a section of flooring in the last one.  There wasn’t much in the way of exhibits inside the cottage – just a few rooms, mostly empty, and only some with fireplaces, like it would have been before the first family moved in.  But it was only a ten minute drive, and I’m glad I went to see it.