Zoo

One of the many perks of the PRESHCO program is that every weekend is a three day weekend. No classes Friday. It’s glorious. It further reinforces the notion that this year is a vacation from Smith. I like to think of it as “recharging” before I resume my flustered existence in the stressful environs that is Smith college.

The plan for Friday afternoon was to check out the botanical garden. A group of us met up and I navigated us through an unfamiliar area of town. We achieved success after I accidentally led us too far and we had to turn back (oops). When we got there the garden was closed. Naturally the schedule I found on the internet was
wrong.

Luckily, the zoo is located across the street from the Garden. I wasn’t expecting a lot from the zoo. Maybe one or two “big draw” animals but it exceeded my expectations. The first exciting animal was the elephant who was throwing dust all over herself presumably to keep cool. She was beautiful but looked a little lonely all by herself in her pen. There was a mom lynx and a baby lynx. We got to watch them chase each other around their enclosure. Unfortunately there was an intense glare on the glass which made it difficult to get a decent photo.

Then there were some monkeys. One of whom clearly had some sort of nervous system disorder as he exhibited involuntary, nervous ticks. It was sad. Then there was a seemingly elder monkey who had a hilariously grouchy look. As I sat down to take a picture with him a female monkey ran up and jumped on the class. Apparently I was too close to her mate. She then proceeded to groom him while he wore a look on his face that said “I’m so sick of this”.

After the monkeys, were the big cats. There was a beautiful female tiger who (spellcheck tells me that using who is wrong but I think she deserves a “who” instead of “that” as she is not an inanimate object) came really close to the glass. Then jaguars. The male jaguar gave us quite the show. He stayed right next to the glass and seemed to be posing for us.

There were two brown bears next. They were on the top of the rocks in their enclosure, standing on their back legs to look through a window at the top. We think they were looking for food. One of then slipped a little and the zoo workers standing near us started to freak out. She caught herself and stood back up instead of plummeting to a premature death.
There were otters but we did not see any probably because they were keeping themselves cool in the shade. There were wolves as well but they too were hiding in the shade.

There was a hippo, zebras, swans, a peacock, goats, emus, wallabies, llamas, and wildebeests. There were ostriches as well; one of whom exhibited some peculiar behavior that I took a video of and hope to post on facebook. I still can’t tell if he was excited or agitated.

The next big animals were the lions. There were two females and a male. I got some good pictures of the females but unfortunately there is glare reflected in my pictures of the male.

That concluded that excursion which was luckily more fun than I expected.