wild kingdom

guess who was on the other end of the line during my first phone call this morning?

radiofan-apology

i guess he was bothered that i hung up on him yesterday. hope he didn't spend all night agonizing over it- i sure didn't.

actually, my night was spent dreaming of snakes- lots of them. i can trace this back to yesterday's visit to the zoo after work. riverbanks zoo is less than a mile from the radio station, and since i'm a member of the zoo, i can visit anytime i want. (yesterday made twice in two days, which i can't say i've managed before.)

in january 2002, our zoo acquired a pair of male koalas from a japanese zoo. unfortunately, kei was put down (he was quite ill with some sort of intestinal malady) a couple of years ago. (if you follow the link, the one on the left, mirai, still resides at the zoo.) however, before kei's passing, plans to bring female koalas to the zoo had already been made. two females, lottie and killarney, arrived at the zoo in september 2003, so mirai didn't go long without playmates.



and play he did- lottie became pregnant, and gave birth late last year to a baby named karoo. karoo was riding on lottie's back when we last went to the zoo in april- i was lucky enough to get a few pictures (which of course, i cannot locate right now- but i swear they exist) during our visit. unfortunately, karoo was found at the bottom of the koala enclosure in late may.

on a positive note, however, our other female, killarney, is thought to be pregnant.



why bore you with all this? well, when i go to the zoo, the koala exhibit is always the first place i head to, and yesterday was no exception.

aside from the koalas (pictured above), this was one of the sights i beheld:


(i know, i know- it's a little hard to make out, but i was trying to discreetly capture the two-tone mullet, which was a vibrant fuschia on top, and black on bottom. even my haircolors haven't been that adventurous. you're lucky i didn't get a shot from the front....this woman had those pawprint tattoos like eve, but believe me- she was no eve.)

outside of the "koala knockabout" exhibit, there is a palmetto tree. several years ago, local artists painted these large metal palmettos (south carolina's main symbol) and then they were auctioned off for charity. apparently, as a symbol of our sister-state relationship with queensland (which is how our acquisition of koalas was arranged), we sent a palmetto decorated with symbols of south carolina over to queensland, and also shipped over a blank palmetto, which was decorated by an aboriginal artists and returned to us......it now stands outside the exhibit. (the exhibit has been open for three years, and i never knew this interesting little tidbit.)

anyway, here are some other shots from my trip to the zoo........



i thought he was stuck....and that the grunting was how he expressed his pain. then i realized that wasn't a rock under him.



who is on exhibit here? after about fifteen minutes of observation, i really had to wonder.

when a couple of the gorillas were lying down on the ground with their butts pressed up on the glass, the little girl in blue kept smacking the glass- mama encouraged her to "spank" the gorillas. i'm afraid i was more than a little appalled at how many folks were ignorant enough to beat on the glass of various exhibits.....



.......like this guy. he was also at the gorilla exhibit during my visit. he did the glass smackers one better- kicking the glass behind one of the gorillas (he was tired of staring at people, i guess, and had turned around) with his cowboy boot. had he not been twice my size, i would have said something. instead, i followed him to the bird house, where he tried to get the attention of both the hornbills and the penguins by emitting an odd high-pitched whistle. (needless to say, the birds were not impressed.)

i should go to the zoo more often- if only to people watch. not tomorrow, though. my shift is early enough that i might be able to kayak after all.....assuming the weather behaves itself.