Five West Ham United stars got up close to some of Australia’s famous animals in Perth.
Pablo Fornals, Danny Ings, Aaron Cresswell, Angelo Ogbonna and Flynn Downes hopped along to Caversham Wildlife Park, where they met kangaroos, koalas and wombats!
While football and fitness are the priorities of pre-season, the Hammers have also been eager to enjoy and immerse themselves in the culture of Western Australia, learning about the State’s indigenous Noongar people and watching a game of Australian rules football.
On Monday afternoon, it was time to go wild as the Irons quartet held koalas and fed kangaroos at the family-run wildlife park in the city’s picturesque Swan Valley.
For animal lover Fornals, who bathed an elephant with wife Tanya on his recent honeymoon in Thailand, it was an experience he hugely enjoyed.
“It’s beautiful and really different to where I’m living and where I’m from, so it’s a nice experience and everyone is enjoying it,” he said. “It was a bit scary because we don’t have koalas in Spain, but he was about the same weight as my baby!
“It was a beautiful moment and it’s not often you get to have a cuddle with a koala! We also got to pat some kangaroos, too, and the animals are very beautiful. I was offered the chance to hold a wombat, but I was happy to hold the koala, that was enough!”
Australia is home to thousands of species which are unique to the country, with over 80 per cent of animals found nowhere else in the world in the wild. Among them are kangaroos, dingoes, wallabies, wombats, koalas and quokkas.
Kangaroos, wallabies, wombats and quokkas are all marsupials, which means they give birth to relatively undeveloped young that grow in a pouch located on their mothers’ abdomen before going out into the world on their own. Dingoes are wild dogs which live in small packs across much of Australia.
Quokkas live only on Rottnest Island, located eleven miles off the coast of the Perth suburb of Fremantle, and a small number of other areas of Western Australia and the cat-sized animals are a symbol of the State.
“It’s a family park and keeps us busy with about 2,000 animals to look after, made up of about 200 different species, with the emphasis being on interaction and for our guests to be able to touch and feel and get up close and feed some of them and learn about them and enjoy the experience,” said manager Debbie Morley, whose parents opened Caversham Park.
“We’ve got some very common animals like kangaroos, right through to critically endangered species most people have never heard of and obviously it’s very important to protect all species because they face all threats out in the wild.
“We are delighted that West Ham paid us a visit and the players had fun meeting the animals and followed Serena Williams and Roger Federer in holding one of our koalas! We missed people for three years during COVID, but we’ve got through it now and it’s onwards and upwards and onto the future.”
To find out more about these wonderful animals, visit the Caversham Wildlife Park website here.
