The Fascinating Life and Times of Me

It has only been 5 years or so since I last went to the San Diego Zoo, but I somehow managed to forget how utterly amazing it is. I recommend it highly. The whole city of San Diego was absolutely gorgeous. There had been a huge storm the day before we got there, so the air was clear, the sky was blue, and everything looked clean and fresh. The weather decided to be in the mid to upper 70s. It was PERFECT.

Anywho, I know you want to see the animal pictures, so here they are. I still don't have a camera, my Dad took all of these. You can click on them to open a bigger picture.

The first animals you see when you walk in the zoo are these flamingos. I'm not sure how they keep them from flying away. They must clip their wings somehow. Or maybe the flamingos know that they have a good thing going. There was this random bird hanging out with the flamingos that was way smaller, duck-sized (but not a duck), and it had the same bright color as the flamingos. I think it is because it was stealing the flamingo chow.

The first thing we did when we got to the Zoo was to go on the double-decker bus tour. Here is a shot of the Giraffes. Note the adorable baby giraffe, which I think was about 6 months old. According to the tour guide, giraffes are the tallest animals at the zoo (shocking!).

Here is a Rhinoserous, also from the tour. It was standing right on the edge of it's enclosure, those people down on the street were maybe five feet away from it. I think it was kind of annoyed with them, it seems to be giving them the evil eye.

That's my arm on the left there. I'm looking at the elephants. On the tour we learned that they keep the girl elephants at the zoo and the boys at the wild animal park. They are the heaviest animals at the zoo, and I think one of them was in a movie once, but I forget which elephant and which movie. Sorry.

In the middle there is a Koala bear. It was very adorable. At the time it was eating some eucalyptus. There are like 5,000 eucalyptus trees at the zoo. There were five or so koalas. There were also some wallabies and kangaroo rats, but no kangaroos.

This is some horned thing, we'll say antelope. At one point in the tour the guide went on for like 5 minutes on how some ox had perfectly symmetrical horns, and that this was as rare as winning the lottery. He told everybody, "take pictures of this, you will never see this again in our lifetime". He even drove the bus around to get a better angle for our photographs. My dad didn't take a picture of that, sorry. But this gazelle or whatever had a nice pair of horns, and look at the one behind it climbing the rock! Agile!

This isn't as good of a picture as I hoped it would be, but this is a Jaguar that is pacing back and forth right in front of the cage. This was about three or four feet in front of us. You could hear it breathing and see its strands of fur. It had big, yellow eyes and the rest of it was pure blackness. And its paws were huge. I think it was pacing because it saw the zookeepers on the other side feeding the other animals, and it wanted to eat too.

The Jaguar lived next door to this Leopard. They lived on the "Cat Walk" located in the equally cleverly named "Cat Canyon". This kitty was pacing too, but he stopped here to watch a little kid that was running up towards him. Or maybe he was watching the zookeeper across the way. Either way he was thinking about breakfast.

So that's part one of my trip to the Zoo. Click here to read part two. Trust me, there are even more awesome animals to come.