So the Louisville Zoo is pretty cool. A couple of these pictures will obviously have stories, which I’ll share later. Time to spend 8 hours in the car and drive to Kansas City.
Guest post this evening sometime, with actual words n’ stuff.
Tag: animals
Have a peacock
I have nothing today, but the zoo was fun.
Just to make sure we’re clear…
…this is what a chimpanzee can do to a small creature that it finds in its enclosure and doesn’t want there. I suspect there is not much weight difference between a toddler and a large raccoon. There is, however, an enormous difference between the strength level of a chimpanzee and a silverback gorilla:
I just figured, judging from the chatter I’ve seen on the internet today, that this might be a useful thing to think about.
We went to the zoo yesterday
I only took a few pictures, but why not, they make for a good Monday morning post. The zoo previously had two elderly Amur tigers who both passed away in the last year from natural causes. They just recently replaced them with four, effectively, kittens. They’re all two years old, and apparently the tiger people are having fits from having to adjust from two geriatric tigers to four energetic babies.
Well, not so much “energetic” today, I guess. Witness the Triangle of Tiger! The fourth one was around the corner.
Flamingo. They have a dozen or so but this one was close by.
And a peacock. The zoo has two peacocks and they’re allowed to just wander around as they see fit. Both of them were hanging around the food court trying to steal french fries. It was pretty cool.
Note that this isn’t typical behavior for them, which is kind of surprising. If I was a bird and I knew there was easy food at the food court all the time, I’d be there more often, but I’ve never seen the peacocks there before.
That time I pissed off a squirrel
It was lovely yesterday; last week was basically the first nice week of the year, and it’s projected to be seventy degrees tomorrow. So we decided to take the boy to the zoo, which was open for all of three hours to people with memberships.
I like our zoo. It’s nothing enormously special as zoos go, but for a town this size I’d say they do pretty well, and most of the animals were at least out of their enclosures and hanging out where people could look at them. The emus were booming, too, which is always a neat thing, because I think emus are neat animals and they’re startlingly loud.
But I don’t actually want to talk about any of the regular animals. We were walking past the anteater (who came outside to piss as we walked past; every time we go to this zoo, we get to see the anteater take a piss) and past the (empty) macaw enclosure when I heard a weird noise from overhead. I thought at first it was the macaw, but after looking around a bit more we realized it was a squirrel.
A squirrel, in a tree, busily eating a Styrofoam cup. The odd sound of squirrel teeth on Styrofoam was what I’d heard.
Um.
“You’re not supposed to be eating those,” I called out to the squirrel. He dropped the cup.
Feeling proud of myself– I had communicated with a squirrel!– I went to pick the cup up. And the squirrel barreled down the tree, chattering at me angrily, and causing me, for the first time in my life, to consider how interested I was in starting shit with an overgrown rat.
My son, of course, was nearby, and terribly interested in the squirrel. The squirrel was screeching at me for getting too close to his coffee cup, and bystanders were starting to take an interest in the whole thing. I mean, this cup is gonna kill him if he swallows too much of it. I’m a person, squirrel! I’m smarter than you! You don’t want to eat this thing!
Holy crap, can squirrels do effective death glares.
Anyway, eventually, once the I’m-not-joking standoff ended, with the squirrel deciding there were too many people around and retreating a few feet back up the tree, I kicked the half-eaten cup (which appeared to have contained hot chocolate, which explained why he was eating it) away from him and picked it up.
Holy hell was that the wrong thing to do.
About thirty feet away from the squirrel’s tree is a life-size statue of a Galapagos tortoise that little kids are encouraged to climb on. My son, being three, wanted to climb on the tortoise, and my wife wanted to take his picture. I couldn’t find a trashcan nearby, so I just sort of stood near them, holding the cup.
The squirrel came down the tree, stood about twenty feet away from us, and just glared. The whole time. Seriously. He’d have killed me if he could.
I’m pretty sure I’ve never made a nonhuman animal that mad at me before.
Hector
He was the happiest, dumbest, most loyal mutt I’ve ever met.
I’ll miss you forever, buddy.
Morning video/Morning eew
You can either watch if you have an interest in nature OR if you have an interest in mocking dudebros who are reading from scripts and can’t pronounce several of the words in them right.
(Seriously. Check how he says “buoyant” in the first minute or so.)
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