And that's a low count, because I saw most of them twice, some of them three times, and a few of them four or more times because we could not figure out a single workable path to see everything the most efficiently and we kept finding ourselves in Africa Rocks. I swear to all the gods that if a zoo would ever just draw me a nice map of the shortest walking path through all their sites, I would make that zoo my entire personality.
Anyway, here's our first pass through Africa!
Here's the
California Condor. My partner had to write a report about the California Condor way back in elementary school, and he should look that teacher up and thank her because he still remembers the whole thing. DDT was so bad!
Fun fact: a couple of weeks after this zoo visit, my partner, the older kid, and I went on another trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon--we've packed in so much travel this summer, yay! Anyway, while we were at the Grand Canyon, the kid and I were SURE we saw a California Condor flying overhead, and we were so excited. Unfortunately, upon further examination of my photos, we decided that what we actually saw was most likely... a turkey vulture.
Ah, well. A real Grand Canyon turkey vulture is also a good get!
I don't really love zoos as a rule, although thanks to my kid who loves zoos THE MOST I feel like I have been to every zoo in every city we've ever visited, but honestly? I kind of loved the San Diego Zoo. It has so many animals, and most of them genuinely seemed happy as clams, calm and content or busy doing animal stuff.
There were also so many really terrific animals, like California condors and giant pandas and capybaras!
There was an entire herd of
capybaras just bopping around doing their own capybara business, and I was obsessed:
I feel like we passed maybe 3-5 different flamingo habitats, though. It's like everywhere they had some empty space, they just put some flamingos in it. That's a decorating hack for you!
There IS a non-zero chance that there are not 3-5 separate flamingo enclosures and it was just me circling the sole flamingo habitat five times, though. I kept getting so lost and somehow I always kept finding myself back at Africa Rocks!
Every time I see a cheetah now, it reminds me of the time the kids and I missed by just a couple of days being at the Indianapolis Zoo when a cheetah escaped. I couldn't find a news source that reported all the details I heard, but the local story is that the zoo had just introduced two new cheetahs (from the San Diego Zoo, of all places!) into their cheetah habitat, which is below the level of the walkways and relies solely on high walls to keep the cheetahs inside.
That was fine for the resident cheetahs, but apparently one of these new guys, after getting the lay of the land, simply hopped up the wall and settled in for a snooze in some bushes next to the walkway. A visitor actually alerted the zoo staff but their alert was more along the lines of "It's so sweet that the cheetahs get to roam free! Are we allowed to pet them if they come up to us?"
The staffer was apparently all, "Um, tell me more...", upon which they were led to and shown the contentedly snoozing cheetah, upon which they issued a zoo-wide lockdown until dude was put back in his area and now the high walls also have a high fence on top of them.
But that's just the story that I heard! Anyway, look for me in the news as the first person to have their face eaten off by a cheetah if I ever see one snoozing in some bushes in a zoo, because I'm convinced that they're gentle. They have dog friends! They walk on leashes!
I'm sorry to say that
this jaguar did not look particularly happy. I've read that a lot of big cats don't do well in zoos, but I've also read that if an animal is ever in an unsuitable zoo environment long enough to develop a coping behavior like pacing, then even if it's later given an environment that theoretically meets all its behavioral and sensory needs, it will still exhibit those coping behaviors. So you can't really just walk up and evaluate an animal's habitat without knowing its history.
The
koalas were also doing absolutely fuck-all with their day, but honestly they seemed thrilled about it:
The Asian leopard also seemed happy hanging out on its catwalk:
Found a dinosaur tree! I love myself a cycad:
Back at Africa Rocks for the umpteenth time, this
bee-eater got itself a mealworm:
I loved the level of educational signage here. I've been to a couple of zoos that didn't even have the Latin name of each animal posted--gasp, right? Extra annoyingly, the first time that happened I had actually arrived armed with a giant stack of DIY animal info cards that I'd laminated and ring-bound and planned for the kids to use for one of those giant, all-day homeschool projects we used to do... except that the whole thing relied on each animal having its Latin name. So much for binomial nomenclature as the backbone of scientific classification, I guess!
This zoo had alllll its scientific names locked down, and had other cool signage telling us stuff like how they chose the plants for some exhibits and what animals lived in Southern California 12,000 years ago:
You can't escape those flamingos!
I really wanted to scritch this Galapagos tortoise under its chin:
I've never seen a
Komodo dragon so busy! It kept moving between investigating the big kid--
--and energetically tearing apart a pig carcass:
At the hippo habitat, three literal grown-ups were having the biggest fight about how many hippos there were. There actually are two hippos in this below photo, but every time a hippo would pop its head up out of the water it would also look kind of like that and then some of the grown-ups would try to count that as two hippos while another grown-up said there was only one hippo but couldn't explain why it looked like two hippos, and then another hippo would pop its head up and mess their count up even more, etc.
The kid was all, "Some people never learned about refraction and it shows."
Another thing I liked about the San Diego Zoo is that our basic admission ticket included stuff that you'd have to pay extra for at another zoo. Earlier in the day we took a double-decker bus tour around the zoo, which was honestly kind of meh but it was nice to sit down for a while. Late in the afternoon, though, the big kid and I finally got on the aerial tram, and omg that's where we spent the rest of our entire day. It was SO GOOD!
Not only did we finally get a hint of a breeze--as well as that glorious sensation of sitting down omg yay--
--but it turns out that seeing the zoo habitats from above is delightful beyond words. Here's the panda!
Looks like he wants to get back in his travel crate and go home for the night, lol:
I think these are mountain lions? I'm not even sure if you could see this perch of theirs from the ground:
I have decent zoo stamina, but after we'd been at the zoo for approximately nine hours (it was open for eleven!) I was staggering, and the overpriced zoo ice cream was starting to look better and better. Since we'd seen all the animals by that time (and all the African animals about four times), we decided that if we were going to have overpriced ice cream, we might as well have overpriced ice cream from a gourmet ice cream shop in San Diego proper, so we left the zoo and did just that:
Tomorrow, we go to the waterfront to see the historic ships!
And here's the rest of our trip!
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
