San Francisco to Sydney - Day 23

Day 23 : San Diego Zoo

Everything in the US, it seems, is world-famous. Well, that's how they bill themselves, anyway. Today, we visited the world-famous San Diego Zoo, though it does have some genuine claim to this description.

After a short bus ride from downtown San Diego, we alighted from the bus at a stop (appropriately enough on the corner of Zoo and Park) about 5 minutes walk from the Zoo's entrance.

Directly in front of the entrance we encountered the flamingo exhibit. Debbie and I had always considered these birds to be graceful and silent. Perched delicately on one leg, they are, without question, graceful. They're also incredibly noisy, like a flock of ducks quacking for a meal.

A little later in the day, after a short ride on the Zoo's Express Bus, we visited the famed panda exhibit. I thought the pandas looked bored and discontent; Debbie thought they were slumbering happily. Whatever their emotional state though, they were certainly intent on conserving calories : neither of them moved while we were there.

Our entry ticket allowed us to take a narrated bus tour of the park, and we did this around lunch-time in a (successful) attempt to avoid the crowds. Our driver-narrator explained to us that many of the animals in the park are officially designated as endangered, the requirement for which is that the animal be likely to become extinct in the next 10 to 15 years. With this definition, I'm surprised that the Zoo isn't yet in negotiations with about half the Aussie Test Cricket team (warning : Aussie joke here).

The tour was informative and it gave us a reasonable overview of the Zoo's layout, but it provided only cursory views of most animal exhibits. So, after the tour, Debbie and I hit the ground and revisited the exhibits that had caught our attention.

In every zoo we've ever visited, the primates have drawn large crowds. San Diego was no exception, and we found twenty or thirty people clustered, watching the gorillas as we arrived. In the photo at right you can see a gorilla who ventured right up to the glass at the front of his enclosure. He stared for a time at me and then at Debbie. I defy anyone not to feel a certain connectedness at such a moment; you just know that there's something cerebral going on behind those eyes and you just wish you could find out what it was. Then again, I suppose, it might be something uncomplimentary such as "Ewww! Ugliest primate I've ever seen!", so maybe it's for the better that we don't know.

Anyway, this gorilla obviously loved the attention of the crowd, and later moved away from the glass to sit against a rock, still in full view of the crowd, where he proceeded to demonstrate how flexible he was by grabbing his toes and then spreading his legs as far as he could spread them while still clutching his toes.

I have a special fondness for meerkats. They have appealing, happy faces and a habit of sitting up on their hind legs, front legs bent downwards rabbit-style, just as the meerkat is in the photo at left. They also have an air and manner which suggests that they are perpetually trying to remember something very important, but just can't quite recall what it is : they pause, assume the position you see in the photo, they look from side-to-side and then they look skyward as if seeking divine help. Eventually, they scuttle off only to repeat the process somewhere else.

In reality, apparently they're acting as sentries guarding the burrow when they undertake this behaviour. In a normal meerkat colony, one or two will be on sentry duty while the rest of the colony gets on with meerkat-life : burrowing, eating and whatever. Here in the Zoo though, they seem to be living in colonies of only two or three, so sentry duty takes up a large proportion of their waking hours.

San Diego also has the obligatory space-filling animals that are the zoo equivalent of cricket's twelfth men : the elephants, rhinos, birds and other animals that, while technically part of the zoo, are not really what we come to see. (Sorry, another cricket reference).

Tigers are certainly not an animal I would classify as space-filling, and we were lucky enough to be there when something caught this tiger's attention and allowed us to snap this photo. In the period leading up to this photo the tiger had appeared to be sleeping soundly in the shade. I guess you should never assume anything when you're around a predator.

Originally posted by TC