It was cold today, but it was a free day at the zoo, and it turns out that winter is a good time to go to the zoo since many of the animals are sporting beautiful winter coats. We saw the African wild dogs, a first for me, and the spotted hyenas, striped hyenas (my favorite of the two) the servals, a quickly pacing fossa, an amur leopard (which, if you’ve seen Planet Earth, makes you feel like you’re looking at a caged ghost) the always gorgeous snow leopard, a lounging polar bear, the arctic foxes, which get the cuteness award for being all curled up into big, fluffy white balls; the otters, a close second in the cuteness category; a swimming tapir and an elephant, among many others. Aside from the arctic foxes and a few others, most of the animals were very active and provided better than average viewing. My favorites were the Siberian tigers and the wolves, who were asleep the first time we looked, but provided a show later on.
To see a full grown Siberian tiger a few feet away is to be awed (is it really that big? It totally is. Look how big it is! You keep dumbly thinking to yourself.) To see it is also to be awwwed when it starts playing with the four already large five-month old cubs nearby. It was hard to be impressed by anything after that, but the three white wolves did a good job of it when, around sunset, they gathered and howled.
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