A Day at the Zoo

Thought for the day:  Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened. [Anatole France]

[Morguefile]

I've always liked going to the zoo, even when they were kinda crappy... you know, back when they were mostly comprised of miserable little cages with concrete floors. When I was a young girl, the Baltimore zoo had two celebrity critters I'll never forget: Robert the gorilla, and Betsy the famous painting chimpanzee. Robert at least had a larger cage than the others, out of respect for his massive size, but he mostly spent his time hanging out on a tire swing and making faces at the people gawking at him through the glass. Betsy the famous painting chimpanzee... painted pictures. (Go figure!) I don't know if she liked painting pictures, but she always looked happy to me. She was even featured on some TV shows... like the Dave Garroway Show... where she sat on a stool and covered a canvas with paint. People allegedly paid good money to buy her paintings, but I doubt if she got a fair share of the proceeds. Maybe an extra banana or two.

Anyhow, now that zoos build more natural habitats for their animals, a trip to the zoo is better than ever. Smarticus and I went earlier this year, and I'm finally getting around to sharing some pics with you.  We actually went on Mother's Day, when (ta-DA!) moms get in for free. (Slick, huh?) Not only did the free entry appeal to my cheap frugal side, but two of the pandas were heading back to China the next day, and I wanted to see them one last time before they left. So, here we go. Some pics... along with a few fun facts.

The more shrimp flamingos eat, the pinker their feathers are. They hold their bills upside-down when they're feeding... which they may do for hours on end...  so they can filter out the food while skimming the water. Cool, huh? Know the proper term for a flock of flamingos? A flamboyance.

[icanhascheezburger]

Theoretically, the gender of a parakeet can be determined by the color of the bump of flesh above its beak. (Called the cere.) It's typically blue on males, and brown on females, a fact my big brother already knew when we were kids. Based on the blue cere, he told our grandmother her parakeet was a boy, and when her little Petey started laying eggs, she wasn't at all impressed with that dirty sow bird.

Warthogs get their name from the wart-like bumps all over their faces. They're so ugly, they're cute. They have good senses of smell and hearing, but their eyesight is quite poor, which is probably a good thing. If they could see each other more clearly, their love lives would probably take a big hit.

Elephants are the only mammals that can't jump, but they CAN swim, and when they're swimming in deep water, they hold their trunks up like snorkels. They're very social animals, and have greeting ceremonies when reuniting with a friend they haven't seen for a while, in which they twine their trunks around each other in what looks like a  hug. They also play, laugh, and ... cry. They even pay homage to the bones of their dead by gently touching the skulls and bones with their trunks and feet. When passing by a place where a loved one died, they stop at that spot for several minutes of silence.

[icanhascheezburger]

Giraffes look kinda clumsy, don't they? But don't interpret that to mean they're slow. Even when they're loping along at a leisurely pace, they're moving those long spindly legs at about 10 MPH. And when running? They can zip along at 35 MPH, but not for long. They run out of breath quickly.

Their fur patterns are as unique as fingerprints, and giraffes from the same area tend to have similar fur patterns, kinda like gang signs.

I don't know if he was moving 35 MPH or not, but this fellow galloped over to the feeding platform pretty darn quickly. Check out his tongue! Giraffes have twenty-inch long prehensile tongues, which they use similarly to the way elephants use their trunks. They not only use their tongues to grab things, but also for personal grooming... like cleaning their ears, and picking their noses. Um, yeah. Moving right along.

Oh, and in case you didn't notice, giraffes are TALL.

[seniorark]

In the wild, a gorilla will build its own nest or sleeping platform, but he'll only use it for one night. (I guess he prefers fresh linens?) Each gorilla has a unique nose print. (Especially if he has the sniffles.) They communicate with gestures, body postures, sounds, and by slapping their chests. In captivity, they've even been taught how to use... sign language.

[morguefile]

And now for the stars of the day. The pandas. I took a lot of pictures of them, but I'll only foist three on you.

For obvious reasons, in China, the adorable black-and-white panda is symbolic of yin and yang. Also of peace. (I reckon pandas spend so much time eating, they don't have any time left to waste by fighting.) Hundreds of years ago, warring tribes in China would raise a flag with a picture of a panda on it to stop a battle and call a truce.

Twins! Cubs Mei Lun and Mei Huan, who turned a year old a couple months after I took this picture, are the only surviving giant panda twins ever born in the U.S. It's hard to imagine by looking at them now, but each one was only about the size of a stick of butter at birth. Pandas are still an endangered species, but zoos have become more successful at breeding them. No easy task. A female is only fertile 2 or 3 days a year, and she isn't always in the mood to mate. If she does get pregnant and successfully gives birth, there's still the very real risk of her rolling over on that little stick of butter and accidentally killing it.

These chubby critters eat a LOT. Matter of fact, they spend from fourteen to sixteen hours a day stuffing their faces with bamboo. On average, they eat twenty-five to thirty pounds of bamboo a day, but in the springtime, they may eat as much as a hundred. Their bodies only absorb twenty to thirty per cent of the bamboo's nutrients, so as you can imagine, they also produce a LOT of panda poo. An adult may excrete a mind-boggling sixty-two pounds of poop in a single day. (See? Don't you learn cool stuff here...?)

So how about you? Do you love going to the zoo? What's your favorite animal?

Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature.  [Albert Einstein]

Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.