Bird Paradise Opens at Mandai, Replacing Singapore’s Jurong Bird Park

Bird Paradise opened on 8 May 2023 at Mandai, in the north of Singapore. It replaced Jurong Bird Park, which had been one of the city’s best-loved attractions since 1971 and closed at the start of the same year. Its birds were moved across the island over several months.

The park

The new park covers 17 hectares and holds about 3,500 birds of 400 species. A quarter of the species are threatened in the wild. It was designed by the Singapore firm RSP.

The principle is that visitors go in with the birds. There are eight large aviaries, each built to represent a habitat and entered through double doors. Paths, boardwalks and hanging bridges run among the trees at different heights, and the birds fly free around them.

Heart of Africa is the largest. It is modelled on the montane forest of Rwanda, with turacos, starlings and bee-eaters. Winged Sanctuary holds the rarest birds, among them more than twenty species of hornbill, in which Singapore’s zoos specialise. Amazonian Jewels has macaws, toucans and tanagers. Others represent the wetlands of the Caribbean, with flamingos, the rice terraces and forests of Southeast Asia, the dry woodland of Australia, and the cloud forest of New Guinea, with its birds of paradise.

Penguin Cove is the one enclosed and chilled exhibit, a tank with a simulated Antarctic climate, seen from above and through an underwater window.

Two shows are given each day in an open-air amphitheatre, one of birds of prey and one of parrots, hornbills and other trained birds.

Mandai

The move brought all of Singapore’s wildlife parks together. Mandai, beside a reservoir at the edge of the central nature reserve, already had the Singapore Zoo, the Night Safari and River Wonders. Bird Paradise was the first part of an expansion that has since added Rainforest Wild, a park of forest trails, and a resort by Banyan Tree, the group’s hundredth property, which opened in 2025.

For travellers

Mandai is about half an hour by taxi from the centre. Buses connect it with Khatib and Springleaf stations on the metro. Bird Paradise takes three to four hours. Go at opening time, when the birds are most active and the air is cool, and time the visit around the feeding sessions in the aviaries. Combined tickets cover two or more parks, and the usual plan is Bird Paradise or the zoo by day and the Night Safari after dark.

For the rest of a stay, see our pieces on hawker culture and on Raffles Sentosa, the city’s first all-villa resort.