Phuket Bird Park Ticket

Phuket Bird Park keeps hundreds of birds in landscaped tropical gardens, and it is built around getting close to them rather than looking at them from a distance — feeding, handling and a show where the birds work rather than perch.

The walk takes you past aviaries and open enclosures set among palms and water. The great Indian hornbill is the bird most people come for: a heavy, prehistoric-looking thing with a casque on its bill that is far larger in person than in photographs. Parrots and macaws are the other draw, and they are used to people enough to take food from an outstretched hand.

Feed cups are sold inside, and the flock that arrives when you hold one is the part children remember. The bird show puts the parrots through counting, colour-matching and retrieving — it is the intelligence of the birds on display, not tricks for their own sake.

Allow an hour and a half to two hours. Most of the route is shaded but Phuket is humid all year, so bring water and come earlier in the day, when the birds are more active and the show is less crowded.