San Diego Zoo

Okay, so along with our Hollywood trip, we went to the San Diego Zoo. I just didn't take the time to post these pictures as well.

They had these fun little ape statues around the ape section so I thought I would make a friend!

Is this not post card material? John captured this picture of the meerkate exhibit!

At anyrate, the zoo was cool, though I was a little bummed that there were no giraffes. Later I found out from a friend the there ARE giraffes, but they were in the section of the zoo that was closed due to construction. we only saw Zebras and gazels.

When we entered the zoo, we made a plan of how to attack so we would get through the entire zoo by the time it closed. The first we looked at were the monkeys....

The black monkeys were the funnest to watch. They were probably the most animated of all the monkeys. I don't have all the pictures posted but they were the ones swinging through all the vines. Here we have a monkey just chilling and scratching his back as it hangs. And then I thought it was funny that a little kid monkey was trying to push around the older monkey. I wonder if they were brothers!

Monkey's have the weirdest grooming behaviors! If evolution in the sense that we came from monkeys DOES exist, then I'm glad we have graduated from grooming in this fashion!

Here is a monkey trying to steal a flower that the other monkey was eating. The other monkey was turned away but as soon as it realized what happened, it turned back and the stealing monkey scrammed. It was quite funny!

The SAME monkey then tried to steal from another monkey and this time stays to fight for it. The stealer monkey never did get a flower to eat by itsself, but here it is playing tug a war with the flower.

It seemed like most of what we looked at was birds. Although the zoo did have these AMAZING huge walk through aviaries that looked tropical and had birds flying all around you. It was pretty cool!

So there was this little twig that FOUR birds were perch on all perfectly aligned. We thought it looked cool. The next picture we took because these birds had the coolest head feathers. We found out later they were called crown pigeons. These were both taken in one of the giant aviaries we got to walk through.

This bird was eating fruit and we were excited that it let us get so close to it! The bird on the right (above) was in a different cage and not in the aviary be we thought it was a cool tropical bird. After a while though, we stopped stopping at all the MANY bird cages and it sped up our walk through the park quite a bit!

Okay so the name of this flamingo (yes it IS a flamingo though it's not pink) is an ALMOST flamingo. I thought it was hilarious that was the actual NAME of the flamingo. Not only did they have almost flamingo's but they also had SUPER orange flamingos. The picture on the right shows the contrast of the orange vs the pink flamingo.

Next, we looked at bears!

The sun bears were really cute and just bathin in the sun. On the left was a great shot we got of one of the cubs. The grizzley bears were playful as well, but I would never want to get in the way of THOSE claws!

So I guess San Diego is like the only zoo in the nation to have panda bears. This is because they research and breed them. Above is the mother bear just cilling on a branch. She then climbed down and hung her head over a stone basin. That had the look of a morning after hang over, huh? John caught these shots! Below is her baby cub sound asleep on a branch.

The koala bear was actually pretty boring to watch. The most animated was when some bears ate their ucaliptis leaves. But the signs around them say that it wasn't just because the koalas were chilly that they were all up by their lamps. These lazy bears sleep between 18 and 20 hours a day!

In fact, most of the bears were lazy. the playing cubs (above) were the best action we got from the bears. We did catch a picture of a polar bear stretching, but we were hoping that it would go in the water. It didn't, though I did discover that the zoo feed them CARROTS for snacks!

There was also a whole section of pigs! They smelt and they weren't all that great to look at either. Though I did get a picture of what I thought was maybe the cutest pig and one which was DEFINITELY the ugliest one! (Below)

I don't remember what the "prettier" pig was called, but the ugliest sure was uglier than Pumba on the Lion King! Yes, that's right, I got a picture of a warthog with the crookedest tusks you'll ever see as well!

The camel next to this one (not in the picture) was foamed at the mouth and the white specks that are on the ground and above this camels right eye (left when looking at it) are spit! I heard the saying that camels spit, but I didn't know it was true!

The elephant mesa was one of the most popular attractions here. They had four or five elephants. This is only one of them. We got to see them break sticks with their trunks and use their trunks to cover themselves in dirt. This elephant looked lonely so we took a picture with it!

All the "cats" were in fully enclosed cages or glass dens. The only problem with cages is that when pictures are taken, the focus is automatically on the closest object in the picture, which tends to be the fense. So alas, I put our savy new camera to work and I switched over to the manual focus to focus beyond the fense. I thought I did a pretty good job, but then I downloaded the picture at home. Though you can see the leopard fairly distinct in the back ground, I got AMAZING focus on the flowers, wouldn't you say?!

We were lucky enough to witness the feeding of this grate animals (by the way, for all that know me, this is one of my favorite animal prints). John joked to his parents, that someone had gotten a little close to the cage, but after the San Fran zoo incident with the tiger, the joke probably wasn't that funny! At any rate, the leopard had an ordeal getting this meat through the cage. The feeder had to eventually get it back and throw it in a different section of the cage while the leopard was distracted.

This is a TREE kangaroo. It's a smaller kangaroo that spends the majority of its life in trees. We didn't have the priveledge of seeing the traditional australian kangaroos, but we did get to read about them. Did you know that when a kangaroo is born, it's not fully developed? A couple of months after conceptions, the fetus makes its way from the birth canal to the mother's pouch. There it locks its jaw (that actually isn't fully formed) around the mother's nipple located on the inside of the pouch. There it remains (continually locked to the mother's nipple) until it finishes its development! Didn't know that, huh?

So I have never seen a hienna in real life. They aren't very

attractive!

At anyrate, this was my really REALLY long blog of my day at the zoo. But in my defense, it was a HUGE zoo! But we did make it through the entire thing and then up and drove to Vegas that night to spend the rest of the weekend with my family.