San Diego, day 2: A day at the San Diego Zoo

[amethyst73]

If you're ever in San Diego, plan to spend a day at the zoo.  (Unless you can't stand animals or something like that.  Then maybe you shouldn't go.  But even then, you should seriously consider it as a possibility.)

Where to start..?

The zoo is huge.  Unless you have infinite amounts of energy, there's just no way to see it all in one day.

But in a way, the large size of the zoo almost doesn't matter, because the quality of each section is so impressively high.  Everywhere we went, I was impressed by how the zoo had managed to combine sizable and appropriate habitats with good spots for the humans to watch the denizens.  For example, in most zoos that have gorillas, the gorillas have a good-sized enclosure that they tend to stay out in the middle of, far away from their gawping, noisy, upright cousins.  I'm not quite sure how the San Diego Zoo managed to design their gorilla space such that the gorillas wanted to nap _literally on the other side of the glass_ in one of the viewing platforms.  The human side of that viewing platform was fairly dark, and the glass was thick and went all the way up to the ceiling, so there was a lot of soundproofing and vision-proofing that went into it.  Also, the really large enclosures (gorillas, tiger, hippo, polar bear, etc) all had multiple viewing areas that, if the animal in question wasn't visible at one, they were likely to be quite visible at another, assuming that they were actually in the enclosure at the time.  The zoo's also obviously put as much thought and work into its plantings as it has into its fauna.  There are trees and bushes and ferns and stuff everywhere, much of it signed and all of it really nicely done.  If I lived here, I would get a zoo membership in a heartbeat.

We did not see the pandas 'cuz there was a line.  We didn't see many bears up close.  And there's two sections of the zoo we barely touched, but I kind of think we may see some of the animals we missed at the Safari Park on Friday.

You can see pictures that I took here (hopefully).

Some highlights:

- Capybaras are the biggest rodents in the world.  But their babies are little!  Little tiny capybaras are adorable!

- We got to see the jaguar getting fed.  The jaguar has to do a set of particular 'tricks' to get her handfuls of raw meat.  The tricks aren't taught for entertainment: they're all geared toward letting her keepers get a good close look at her every day and for the vets to be able to take care of her more easily. Jaguar video here.

- Somewhat similarly, next to the HUGE elephant enclosure, there was the Elephant Care Building.  Much of the 'building' is outdoors and open for public viewing, though not up close.  You can see the special giant cages where the keepers give the individual elephants their baths, foot care, trunk and tooth care, etc in one of the photos.  The bars look like they're probably made of I-beams wrapped in additional steel - they're REALLY strong.  But they also have specialized doors at exactly the right heights so that the keepers can easily get at their ears, feet, etc without having to go in with the animal.  An angry elephant (or jaguar) is clearly no joke, and there's a lot of care and thought that goes into their keeping.

- There are a lot of aviaries at the zoo, which is great if you're a bird person!  Of particular note, there's an aviary of hummingbirds and finches down in the kiddie area.  Once the humans have been sitting quietly for a few minutes, some of the birds get fairly bold and will come and drink from the nectar dispensers - including the finches, which surprised me.  Extremely pretty, colorful little birds; it was really difficult to get good shots though.

- Near the end of the day, we were pretty tired.  We went over to one of several cafes to sit down for a while.  And wandering around loose with her two little chicks was this peahen, who was obviously used to being around people, who came to within a few feet of us!  I caught a video of them that's about a minute long.