The Zoo!

OK…I think this is my last post for this trip—Meredith will have to pick up the rest, since it’s back to reality for me tomorrow (back to work).  We got to the zoo, and were greeted by a group of flamingos, as well as this handsome guy:

We started to plan our day, with Ella as our guide.

We decided to head toward the Pandas first, but along the way, came across a variety of sleeping bears:

OK…the last one wasn’t sleeping, but he looked like he was having a good time.  In his same area, I got a chance to see how our new lens would do up close:

We found the pandas, and they were pretty funny.  The male and female that were on display were in separate areas.  The male was passed out asleep on the ground, which didn’t really net a good photo.  The female on the other hand, was ticked off.

Apparently there had been some construction noise in the area earlier, and she was really mad—she paced back and forth the entire time we were there.

What a prima donna!  After that, we found some more flamingos.  I learned that there are actually several types of flamingos, of which two were present at the zoo—the lesser flamingo and the Caribbean (or American) flamingo.  The lesser had some crazy eyes—even if it wasn’t about to fly over and hurt me, it looked like it wanted to.

The Caribbean flamingo looked a lot nicer—perhaps the lesser flamingo had been used as a croquet mallet by the Red Queen or something.

There were a lot of birds around the area—I also caught a shot of this cool looking duck, and an egret.

After seeing the birds, we made our way up the hill toward the Polar Bears.  Unfortunately the real bears were behind pretty smudgy glass, so I don’t have any cool photos of them, but Ella really enjoyed the fake ones.

As we were working our way around the polar bear exhibit, we came across this family of ducks.  they were pretty awesome to watch, though exceptionally hard to get all of them in one photo.  This is about half of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We walked around for a while, and saw lions, elephants, and lunch, and then we decided to try the bus tour.  Unfortunately, it took us to most of the park we had already seen, but at least we had some time to sit down, and take some more pictures.

We had an awesome time, and there was a LOT we didn’t get to see.  We were pooped, but happy to see such an amazing display of animals—as well as Ella’s delight in discovering so many new things.