So it's so dark, it's so rainforest like isn't it? It's that perfect dappled light
that you would expect to see in a real rainforest. Like this leaf litter, it's
so nice and cool, it's so comfortable on her pads. So she moves under total cover,
so she's totally hidden from the from the visitors. So essentially this is
the edge of her territory. So you can see this is where she traverses.
So I want to show you one feature that we built. You know she's a tropical animal
and on a 30-40 degrees heat in in Melbourne, really difficult to cool
herself down, so while she does have access into off limits ideally we want her to be out here in
the view of the visitors. So what we did, we made what we call an ice bed. Essentially it's a box
and we've got two really large, I guess, ice bricks. They're actually Jerry cans that we obviously fill
with water, put them in the freezer and then she'll lie on this as well to cool herself down.
Both of these caves here, they're heated. It's about 25 degrees, so you will often
see Indrah here in the cooler months at 25. Actually this is on year round.
This is what we call our carcass drag. If a tiger in the wild brought down prey in the open the
first thing they'll do is they'll drag it under cover and that's where they'll start eating. So
what we do for Indrah and Hutan, we attach or we we tie their food to this. So this is our pretend
carcass. Obviously in the wild the carcasses they're taking down 150-200 kilos, so massive.
Each of these are 20 kilos, so we've got 80, we've got 100 kilos that we're asking Indrah to
push over into cover, so perfect tiger behaviour. It's really just about that
physical challenge and simulating that sort of behaviour that they would do in the wild.
We've got some elevation. Obviously you know all cat species are really visually stimulated so this gives
her a little bit of elevation, little bit of outlook that she
can see beyond here. I don't know that she can quite see a [Tasmanian] Devil.
So the zipline really is a really, really unique way that we've come up with to offer
those really important behavioural opportunities for Indrah: so the hunts,
the catch and the kill. Those behaviours are really really challenging for any sort of
zoo captive organisation to give predators, but this achieves those behaviours really,
really well. Indrah uses all of the bamboo as cover which is what a tiger would do in the wild,
she would go behind one cover when the time is right, when the prey is not looking.
She'll quickly make a dash to the next cover. It really is amazing and she really loves it.
It's such an amazing physical challenge for her and even a mental challenge, you can almost see
her brain thinking what her next move is. It's just amazing, really it is.
But what I really want to show you is these marking panels. Tigers are really solitary
however they're not asocial. So how tigers would communicate naturally in the wild is
via scent marks, so usually it's on the edge of their territory, because what
they're trying to do is advertise that that territory is occupied. So they will reverse up
to a tree, usually like an overhanging tree, they'll spray on the underside of it so the
rain doesn't wash away their mark essentially, and that mark is telling us a whole bunch of
information about that animal. So if it's a male or if it's female, how long ago that animal pass
via that site and made that mark. So in order to allow Indrah and Hutan to communicate to
well between themselves as naturally as possible, we've installed these marking
sites. So you can see that they're very well used. So Indrah will come along and will
mark on this, spray on it, and then every six weeks we rotate this panel into Hutan's habitat
and the panel that he's got, which is exactly the same dimensions, we just slot into here.