We had a beautiful and sunny Autumn afternoon today, so we popped over to the zoo for a bit. We told the kids we would go through one section, and since the girls both wanted to see the elephants, we picked the River's Edge. I think this is one of my favorite parts of the zoo!
The kids had a fun time finding the animal prints in the sidewalk, and the actual animals did not disappoint. It took us a couple hours to go through the river walk because we had to tear the kids away from each and every animal!
The Black Rhinos were a big hit. There was a mom and a little one, and they stayed out in the visible open for a long time, and the baby even ran around a bit which excited Michael Jr to no end. I have two questions about the rhino:
1) Are we sure dinosaurs are extinct? Because this is looking distinctly prehistoric to me.
2) Did you know a rhino's horns are made of hair? Well, specifically, it's keratin, the protein that makes up hair and fingernails. The point is that it isn't bone, which is what it looks like. Also, please note the tufts of hair at the top of the ears - that cracks me up.
It was difficult to persuade everyone to move on from the rhinos. Whenever they would walk around the corner and out of site, Michael Jr would start yelling "Moooo?! Mooooo?!" and then get super excited when they came back. But I'm sorry to say, rhinos, that you were all but forgotten by the time we got to the Nile Hippopotamus tank.
Have you ever seen a hippo swim? It's unbelievable. These active hippos kept the kids riveted for at least twenty minutes.
After a while, Michael Jr had so much pent-up excitement that he apparently had to let out a long, loud, high-pitched scream accompanied by jumping and flailing his arms in order to keep from imploding. It reminded me of a pressure cooker.
Some time later, we moved on to the elephants. Mary was very happy to see the family of five elephants, which she and Catherine decided was a mom, dad, brother, sister, and baby girl. In reality, it was a grandmother with her two daughters and two granddaughters (I think), but I didn't tell them that.
A baby elephant! Cute, in a dry, giant, smelly, prehistoric kind of way.
When we told Michael Jr it was time to say bye-bye to the elephants, he donned his stormy look and emphatically shook his head "no" over and over. Luckily for us, he doesn't yet make the decisions in the family, and on we went.
Did you know there is an Insectarium at the zoo? I had never been in it before, but we saw a sign for butterflies and that was all we needed to recover from the trauma of leaving the elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giant anteaters at the River's Edge. Before we got to the butterflies, we looked at beetles, scorpions, ants, spiders, centipedes, walking sticks and many, many more insects.
It seems this put Michael Jr over his boiling point again, because while he was looking at a terrarium with large black beetles in it he started shrieking in short, high bursts. I'm pretty sure everyone in the building jumped a foot and was convinced that the tarantula in the next cage was somehow on him instead of safely behind glass, because he seriously sounded like a maniac. But I knelt down next to him and he was not scared or upset at all, just excited. He looked at me, looked at the beetle, shrieked, look at me, shrieked, looked at the beetle, shrieked... by this time everyone in the vicinity had realized the bugs were all secure and Michael was simply nuts, which they mostly found funny.
With much cajoling, we made it to the end of the Insectarium: the butterfly dome. It's fairly small, but there was a display of wiggling cocoons, which Catherine loved, and lots of butterflies flying around and about. I had to hold on to Michael Jr because I was afraid he was going to reach out and squish a butterfly in his fist, but I managed to snap a picture of one that landed close by.
And that was about all we could handle of the zoo for a day. I really love that it is free and close so there is no pressure to see it all in one visit!
