NOV-A-3
DEVIN AND JORDAN TAKE THEIR PARENTS AND
GRANDPA THROUGH THE
EVEN TO LEARN A FEW NEW ANIMALS IN THE
PROCESS!
Today was a day of playing with two very entertaining little men, who can spell out their ABC’s or count rather ahead of their two year old peers, and we had to add a few new animals to their vocabularies –and mine.
We packed them up and went to the San Antonio Zoo—my first, and only Michael and Judy’s second time there. We saw the brass family pride of lions at the entrance—worn shiny from the number of people climbing on it to follow their kids attracted to it—rather like one of my first memories of the John Ball Park Zoo of this kindly old man in bronze with some kids on his lap which was a statue worn shiny brass smooth by all the climbing it had had in generations—to which I contributed a polish or two. We managed to get by it on the way in, but we did get it sat on properly on the way out, in taking turns amid others who were there to do the same—mostly Spanish speakers in low hip-huggers. The kids had a red wagon to retreat to but mainly used it only as the chuck wagon for snacks and drinks, as Grandma got pushed around in the wheel chair that Michael and I retrieved from Health South on the first trip. We could carry both the wheel chair and the red wagon in the back of the Sport Trac sine it has a gate that folds back on the tailgate to convert the short bed into a full size pick up truck bed.
We went up through the “Safari Guide” of the San Antonio Zoo pattern, which has a charge for us to attend—unlike the national Zoo at DC—and we went to the exhibits that we figured would be the favorites for the kids—like zebras, elephants and lions. They, of course, found much more interesting animals—like the squirrels that kept running back and forth around the enclosures an walkways and the large flocks of blackbirds that came in from the outside world. They also hopped on a Komodo Dragon in Bronze to pose with the real thing flicking its long tongue out just behind them.
On the tongue flicking example, Devin was thoroughly licked by the very long and inquisitive tongue of a South American Anteater who came over to the chicken wire mesh at that enclosure and licked him thoroughly to see what manner of creature was staring at him from the other side of the fence!
NEW CREATURES IN MY OWN “ANIMAL PLANET”
As I walk
around this, or any, zoo, it is a mark of a very good zoo if it can show me an animal
or two that I am not already very familiar with—such as the black and white
rhinos, the collections of the gazelles or twisthorns or the birds and snakes. San Antonio Zoo has a very good reptile house
and a lot of birds—but it is still a very unusual zoo that can introduce me to
a new mammal. Remember that I have just
come from the
Well, I
found several species I had not seen and good examples of them as well! My first was a long tailed black monkey
called the Francois’ Langur, and then a small cat that looks like a one fourth
size cougar or puma called the “fossa.”
Most of these brand new speices to me are from the huge biodiversity of
endangered subspecies on
The kids themselves saw an animal that they immediately recognized—and I did not—the ring-tailed lemur of Madagascar that they call Zaboomafoo—from a program they watch on TV to introduce the animals of the world. This would be the perfect time for me to show them the pictures from earlier this year in Zambia of all the African animals they have just seen in the zoo, and are seeing right now on the TV—like Elephants, lions, zebras, hippos, monitor lizards---and even—surprise!—a wolverine!
There is a
good display of a snow leopard and two kits and of course I have a long story
associated with the snow leopard in my Himalayan excursions in high mountain
places where they are so furtive and hard to find. They had side by side African and Indian
elephants at a set of picnic tables that the two boys decided would be a good
place to sit for a snack and they had a “Zoo Picnic.” They also had side by side black and white
rhinos from
In addition to the usual Greater Kudu and Okapi, they had a series of gazelles, including a lot of Dama’s Gazelles and the smaller variety named “Speke’s Gazelles” after Richard Burtons’ hunter partner and later life bete noir.
Two bird speices that they had which were really spectacular finds for me were the e Australian Great Crowned Pigeon—an indigo blue pheasant size bird, and the Palowan Peacock Pheasant—a spectacular bird from the Palowan Island of the Philippines to which I am supposed to be going this next year. It looks like the Manal—the emblem of Himachal and a prize high altitude pheasant of the Himalayan forests.
Now we have packed them home, and after each has bounced upon Grandpa—a game in which Jordan usually leads off, while Devin usually prefers for me to help him with the jigsaw puzzles of the fire truck, tractor, helicopter and jet plane figuring out a lot of it then handing it to me and saying “Grandpa do it.” Both have a train set that Judy got at Sam’s Club and each has their own train on that tracks, so they play rather well together on it.
That is
what I did the rest of the day—although part of it was wasted watching the
Redskins lose to the Cowboys in their fourth straight loss under Steve Superior
from