Penguin Pictures

There's a reason for these.

Okay, the reason was that I needed a place to park them to give them a web address so I could post them in a message, but now that they are here, I'll just leave them.

Two Zoos

When we left Moline, we finally drove to one of the four states on our trip we hadn’t been in before, South Dakota. Family time over, adventure time begun (although being with my family can be something of an adventure). Tuesday we drove across Iowa to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

We were only spending one night in Sioux Falls, but we left early enough to get there around three P.M., so while John drove I searched the tour guide for things we could do in an afternoon. The Great Plains Zoo and Delbridge Museum of Natural History sounded like a good choice. It was near our hotel, it would let us do a lot of walking in the fresh air after being cooped up for hours in the car, and we could probably get in for free.

For years, John has had an annual membership to the Baton Rouge Zoo, that allows us unlimited visits. Many zoos around the country have reciprocal agreements to honor each other’s zoo membership, and as we found out on a trip to the Honolulu Zoo, even the ones that don’t have formal ties might let you in free anyway. The Great Plains Zoo is part of a reciprocal zoo agreement with our zoo, so in we went for free. 

Even if we had had to pay the admission price, it would have been well worth it. The zoo has some amazing exhibits, including a small herd of black rhinos in a large, naturalistic enclosure, and some rare Japanese macaques (snow monkeys), which I was not able to get a picture of. Here is a sample of the pictures I did get:

This fellow looks familiar

Hello

Galapagos Tortoise

Just like in our zoo at home, peacocks roam free.

Entrance to the rhino exhibit

Black rhino, also known as hook-lipped rhino

All the trees have been browsed to the same height.

African Yellow Tortoise. One of his habitat mates was courting a female at the back of the habitat.

The John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, Michigan is a smaller zoo with smaller animals, but it also has nicely laid out play areas for children and is in a stunning physical setting. We got in there for free, too, but again, it would have been worth it to pay admission.

Statue at Zoo Entrance

Golden Eagles

Bobcat

Brown Bear

Capybara

Warthog

The quotation on the bench is from The Giving Tree.

Wallaby with baby

Wallaby with baby

John figures our savings not paying admission to the zoos on this trip paid for his membership for the year. That is something to consider if you have a local zoo and do a lot of vacation traveling. Someday when you are on the road and your pocket cash is disappearing fast, that membership might give you something to do for an afternoon at no additional cost.

The Sting

My husband has two different sized ears.  This is not a normal condition with him; but two days ago he got stung by a yellow jacket while weeding the garden. He told me what had happened and complained about how his ear itched, while icing it intermittently and rubbing on the hydrocortisone cream I had leftover from an ant attack. 

Later at dinner I looked up at him and noticed that his left ear, the one that had been stung, was twice the size of the right. The ear lobe was also a bright red.

It is getting better. Today the left is down to one and a half times the size of the right, and a paler pink.

John is fond of saying that you think you own your property, but when the sun goes down, you realize it belongs to the insects. Apparently they are now taking over during the daytime, too. The insects are not the only ones who share property ownership with us. Even though we live on a suburban lot that is maybe one-third of an acre in size, we share it with mockingbirds, cardinals, the occasional raccoon, a possum, robins briefly when they fly through in the spring heading north, hummingbirds, lizards, a frog or two (or maybe toads, I can’t tell the difference), a lot of spiders, and every so often a grass snake. There are also squirrels. We have given up trying to grow any sort of vegetable because of the squirrels. 

I have also written before of the egrets and hawks that live in our neighborhood, but there has only been one hawk in my yard, a juvenile perched briefly on my fence next to a squirrel until I drove up and scared him off.

Lately there has been much made of a study that shows that house cats are predators (people did not know this?), thirty percent of them killing two or more wild animals a week. So what are the other seventy percent doing, marching up and down with signs saying, “Go Green, Go Vegan”?

This has led to renewed pleas to deprive small domesticated animals of their own turf and keep them indoors. I wonder if in the next ten thousands years or so raccoons, squirrels, and crows are going to co-evolve with humans to the point that our descendants will be enjoined to keep their raccoons on a leash or indoors and spay or neuter their squirrels. Catch, spay and release programs for possums? Rescue families sought for crows?

Crows are smart, though. Only their lack of hands keep me from worrying that some day they might be catching, spaying, and releasing us.

Making Tracks

If you go to this link, you can see a huge, searchable image of ancient elephant tracks laid across what is now a desert in the United Arab Emirates. They were made at least 6-8 million years ago, while the land was watered by a river, not the dry wasteland it is today.

According to Discover Magazine

There are many fossils of prehistoric elephants that show how their bodies evolved from smaller ancestors. But elephants are much more than just tusks and trunks. They have rich social lives, full of empathy, and their behaviours haven’t fossilised as well. We know that some elephants, like the mammoth and mastodon, spent some of their time in groups, thanks to the occasional trackways and mass graves.  But the Mleisa 1 site offers much clearer evidence.
Studying it wasn’t easy. The site is too massive to photograph from the ground, but the individual prints are too small to show up on satellite images. To accurately map the trackways, Nathan Craig from Pennsylvania State University attached a small pocket camera to a kite and snapped a set of overlapping images from above. He stitched the images together into a single large mosaic, which you can see on Gigapan. By calibrating the aerial mosaic with measurements taken on the ground, the team could study the herd’s footsteps from the air.

Wired.com also has an article on the elephant tracks.

One day, sometime around seven million years ago, a herd of bizarre, four-tusked elephants crossed the desert that stretched over what is now the United Arab Emirates. Thirteen of the behemoths plodded along together, perhaps moving towards one of the wide, slow rivers which nourished stands of trees in the otherwise the arid region. Sometime later, a solitary animal trudged across the herd’s path in another direction. We know all this because paleontologists have found the tracks of these massive animals.
Scientists were not the first people to wonder about the fossil footprints. The huge tracksite – which stretches over an area equivalent to seven soccer fields – had been a source of speculation among local Emirati people for years. Dinosaurs and even mythical giants were thought to have been responsible for the potholes. It wasn’t until the spring of 2001 that a resident of the area, Mubarak bin Rashid Al Mansouri, led researchers from the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey to the immense fossil field.
Dinosaurs had not created the tracks. The snapshot of time represented by the trace fossils came from the Miocene, sometime between six and eight million years ago — all the gargantuan non-avian dinosaurs had died out over 60 million years previously. Based upon the geological context and what had been found in the area before, fossil elephants were quickly identified as the trackmakers. The site was named Mleisa 1.

If the world had had to wait for me to think of using kites to make aerial photographs of the tracks, it would have been waiting still. I think it’s the most creative use of a kite since Ben Franklin and his key.

It’s amazing what the tracks themselves can tell us about elephant behavior. Elephants travel in herds organized around a matriarch. When the males hit puberty, they set out on their own until they find another group to join. The lone tracks in this picture were made by such a male, not at the same time as those of the herd.

I’m grateful for the scientists who know how to give us these snapshots of long ago. Our lives are measured in decades rather than centuries, and we can’t run as fast as some of our fellow mammals, swim as well as fish or soar like birds, but thanks to the curiosity and inventiveness of some, we can look back over billions of years of history and see out for trillions of miles.

What could be cooler than that?

Zuri Turns Two

Two years ago our local zoo made the national news with the birth of a baby black rhino. Eventually named Zuri, Swahili for "beautiful", the female rhino weighed in at 75 pounds and was one of three baby rhinos born that year. 

The black rhinoceros, also known as the hook-lipped rhinoceros, is endangered in the wild. The Baton Rouge Zoo bred Zuri as part of its participation in the Species Survival Plan (SSP). Organized by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), the SSP began in 1981 as a cooperative population management and conservation program for selected species in zoos and aquariums in North America. 

Zuri became an instant hit at the zoo. She made her public debut around the time of Boo at the Zoo in 2009 and was not shy about posing for the adoring public.

Zuri at one month

Baby Zuri profile

Following Mama

This year the zoo celebrated Zuri’s second birthday. Since John has a zoo membership and I get in for free as his guest, we decided to go see what the fuss was about. Zuri was not posing for pictures, at least not while we were there. I tried to grab a shot of her sleeping in the distance with her mother, Gemstone, but it was too blurry to see anything. We did sign a happy birthday banner for her. The docent also told us Zuri now weighs 1000 pounds, more than half as much as her mother, who weighs 1800. I wonder if they are having mother-daughter squabbles now that Zuri is older. “Why can’t I pierce my horns, mom? All the other rhinos are doing it. You are so old fashioned!” Probably not.

We missed them serving her special birthday cake, with the carrots for candles.

While I didn’t get any shots of Zuri, I did get a few of the tigers in the zoo’s Realm of the Tiger exhibit. It opened last year.

Sumatran Tigers

Malaysian Tiger

Next on the list for upgrading is a new elephant pavillion, with shaded resting spots for both the elephants and the humans. Back in the 1960’s, a local children’s television personality known as Buckskin Bill urged the community to build a zoo. When Baton Rouge voted in the funding for the zoo, he led a penny drive to raise money to buy the first two elephants for the zoo. The elephants, one of whom was named Penny, were there when the zoo opened in 1970. The new zoo had what were spacious animal habitats for its day, but it is continuously being updated to provide more naturalistic homes for its residents. The elephants are long overdue for nicer digs.

I know a lot of people don’t like zoos. When we were on our Antarctic cruise, John and I were eating dinner with two of the naturalists one night when one of them asked us about Baton Rouge. Since we had been looking at a lot of wildlife, I unthinkingly said, “It has a nice zoo.” I got a strained smile in response, along with the comment that, “You really shouldn’t mention zoos to a naturalist.”

I can understand that, but at the same time, if you had never seen a lion or a tiger or a hook-lipped rhinoceros, would you care if they went extinct? Zuri puts a face on a sad problem. She also serves as a shot at a solution.

Birds of a Feather

I didn't used to pay much attention to birds.  I could identify the obvious ones, like robins, cardinals, and blue jays, and the exotic ones, like flamingos. I wouldn't know a purple martin from Purple Rain, or an indigo bunting from the Indigo Girls.

When I became a home owner, I began to be a little more familiar with the birds in our neighborhood. There was a woodpecker who used to peck on the attic of my first house. Cardinals eat the seeds off our magnolia tree. Then of course there are the mockingbirds, who dive bomb our cats. Mockingbirds are little terrorists. I've seen crows that are more than twice their size winging away from mockingbirds for dear life. 

Since Hurricane Gustav came to town three years ago, there are birds living in our neighborhood that I did not used to see. I'm not sure whether the storm caused birds to seek out new habitats or whether I'm just paying more attention to the skies around me, but I'm fairly certain we did not have egrets living at the lake down past the school when I moved into the neighborhood. I never noticed the mourning doves prior to the storm, either, and they are almost as numerous as the mocking birds now. Red-winged blackbirds are scarcer, but I've only seen them in the last three years, too.

Rufous sided towhee at the Bluebonnet Swamp. The only reason I know what it's called is because the nice gentleman who called it to my attention told me.

Two years ago, I came home to find a sharp-shinned hawk sitting on my back fence. I had my camera with me and got a blurry shot through the windshield. As soon as I got out of the car it flew away.

Juvenile sharp-shinned hawk on my back fence

In the past few days, I've been seeing a pair of red-tail hawks around the neighborhood. For years, I have seen hawks high up in the air overhead all around the city, but these two were flying low over the road to the lake.  The next day, I saw one circling the highway next to the Target parking lot, and when I got to the lake, the other one was sunning itself on the fence. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera, because I was perfectly positioned to roll down the window and get a clear shot.

I wonder if these birds are the beneficiaries of the recent recession. Back in the 1970's and 80's, several subdivisions around town were built around country clubs with golf courses. Ownership of the golf courses, however, did not rest with the homeowners/club members, and when interest rates dropped, several of the golf courses were sold off for further housing development, or in the case of two that backed up to main roads, business development. One of those is opposite Target. It was scheduled to become an upscale shopping center with boutiques, a Whole Foods, a bookstore and other small shops, but that was pre-2009. Now it sits abandoned, returning to the swamp it used to be back when the brothers Iberville and Bienville first set foot in the Delta mud. 

I'm pretty sure that egrets are living there. I see the egrets flying over the interstate almost every day. I have brief, humorous imaginings of some local TV station strapping video cameras on them. "Let's go to our live egret cam for a look at your 5 PM traffic. You can see that traffic is already slow on I-12 at Millerville due to construction on the Amite Bridge."  I wouldn't be surprised if alligators were living there, too. 

Heron at the lake near the drugstore

I think we need a word for that subset of animal life that is not domesticated, but does live in suburban backyards. It's hard for me to think of the raccoons and mockingbirds that eat our cat's food or the cardinals that nest in our magnolia tree as "wildlife", but they aren't tame, either. It's easier for me to think of the hawks and egrets as truly wild, but if they are going to set up shop in my backyard, I may have to rethink that as well.

Flyways and Highways

Great Blue Heron

Spring and fall are good times for watching birds in my neighborhood. We live five blocks from a pond (we call it a lake, but it's really a borrow pond leftover from highway construction, being fed by a few springs) and there's another one a mile further up the road, near a hospital and medical office building. Both ponds are home to flocks of domestic looking ducks, but the hospital pond has acquired some egrets and at least one blue heron.

I saw the heron and an egret on a trip to my gastroenterologist two weeks ago, or thought I did. Sunday I went to the drugstore in the area and took my camera with me so I could take pictures if I saw them again. The egret was there (and very camera shy), but no heron. There was a gaggle of very fat geese and I wondered if I could have mistaken one for a heron given the brief glimpse I had.

When I got home, there was a hawk sitting on my back fence. That's not a usual sight. Since I had my camera handy, I took its picture through the windshield. The pictures are quite blurry, but it was a hawk, possibly a sharp-shinned hawk. It flew off when I got out of the car.

Yesterday I was back at the gastroenterologist, again with my camera. The heron was there again, and not so camera shy as the egret, so I got a good picture.

This morning, driving along the interstate to work, I saw two more egrets. When it rains, puddles form in the drainage ditches along the highway, and they love to stand in them. Back in the early 1900's, when egret feathers were all the rage for hats, egrets were in danger of dying out. Now they are common features along our roadsides. I miss hats, but I'm glad the birds survived.