Friday, July 1, 2011

The Zoo

The other day I took my kids to the zoo with my niece and grand-niece.  It was a beautiful sunny day but just cool enough to not be miserable as you are pushing a stroller around up and down hills.

It was a rather impromptu excursion to the zoo - the best kind!  I have an annual Zoo membership so its kind of nice to be able to go whenever you feel like it.  For instance, we didn't leave my home until close to 3:00 pm and didn't get there until 3:30 pm give or take.  As we were arriving, a mass of people were leaving - it felt like we had the Zoo pretty much to ourselves.

The biggest attraction for our Zoo these days is the Elephants.  They rebuilt a new exhibit for the elephants over the last couple of years; therefore, our elephants have been missing.  I was disappointed because there are supposed to be roughly 5 elephants in the exhibit and I only got to see one.  The exhibit is pretty cool though and worth the wait!

The primates have always been fun to see - so we headed up the long hill pushing strollers.  A great exercise I might add!  We get to the top and we see one of the "zoo keepers" feeding turtles.  So we stood around and waited to see if the turtles would get out of their little mud-puddle to eat.  They did, and it was pretty cool to see.  The kids thought it was neat!

We went inside to see the primates and realized that most of them were in their outdoors exhibits.  I'm a big fan of the orangutans and was so amazed at what we got to witness.  I wish I had brought my camera because this was pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime chance opportunity.  Two zookeepers came up to the outdoor exhibit with some sort of device.  As they approached the cage area, only one of the two orangutans made its way over to the zookeepers and rather quickly.  As if he was the only one called over by the zookeepers.  For about 5 minutes they were teaching him what appeared to be sign language.  The orangutan followed directions.  It was pretty remarkable to watch first hand.  Then after the zookeepers gave him praise and a "reward", they walked away and the orangutan went back from where he came from in the exhibit.

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