A Day at the Zoo

Becca and I went to the zoo more than a month ago and we wanted to blog about it. Unfortunately, we wanted to include pictures we took on our digital camera, but we weren't web-savvy enough. So now months after the fact, we finally got around to finding out how to put pictures in a blog. Becca started writing this alone, but I joined in and now I have it posted on my blog.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a spectacle of graphics and sound. Or just graphics.
Presenting... Our day at the National Zoo, from A to Z. (But we're missing a lot of letters in between. And there may be some repeated letters. And they aren't in any particular order. Except A and Z.)


Anemones! These are the only animals we found that started with A. They look groovy under a black light.



Capybaras! Otherwise known as Rodents of Unusual Size. These largest of rodents have made a few appearances on the Board lately, so we had to include them in our tour. Peter says they are tasty.



Cheetahs! Fastest animal on earth my fanny. All it did was sit there and look at the zebras in the cage next door. The Washington Post recently reported that one of these cheetahs just gave birth to 4 cubs. Congratulations to the lucky couple. It's apparently the first time in the Zoo's history that they have had cheetah cubs born. Hard to believe, since female cheetahs can mate more than 100 times a day. You'd think they'd have gotten lucky one of those times. . .



Elephants! This little fella was really cute, even though he was 5 times as big as we were. And I do mean fella; his gender became apparent after he peed all over the floor. Holy cow, it was like a fire hose hanging out and turned on full blast. He and momma did tricks for the crowd in exchange for yams. The Elephant Union has apparently successfully lobbied for raises since the peanut days.



Flamingos! Have you ever seen a flamingo take a drink? They do it upside down! Like when I get the hiccups and try to get rid of them and end up spilling water everywhere. They do it much more gracefully, despite being really funny looking birds.



Giraffes! Quite honestly, these guys weren't very exciting. They didn't even pee.



Golden-headed lion Tamarin! That's a gallon-size name for a pint-sized animal. These little guys were cute. The National Zoo doesn't have a monkey house, so we couldn't see monkeys doing obscene things and throwing poo at the visitors. So the tamarins filled that playful niche. They were more well-behaved, actually. They apparently set them up with radio collars and have them run free in the woods in the Zoo during the summer.



Gorillas! Sometimes Peter tries to groom me in this manner, making all sorts of unpleasant smacking mouth noises while pretending to eat my body lice. He doesn't understand why it gets on my nerves. First, because I resent even the notion that I have body lice. Second, because why would he want to pretend to eat it? Gross.



Arapaima! Big Fish! This thing was huge! It was more than six feet long. See that little fin on the side? Your hand is smaller than that. I tried to get Peter to jump in the tank for perspective, but he didn't like the idea for some reason. It could have had something to do with the piranhas. Eh, he needs to lose some weight anyway.



Dead Kangaroo! We were quite appalled to come across this deceased marsupial. We attempted to resuscitate it by yelling and throwing sticks, but to no avail. There were quite a lot of dead animals at the Zoo that day, actually. You imagine kangaroos bounding across the endless outback, so it's a little disappointing to see it unconscious behind a chain link fence.



Dead Lion! These big cats are Becca's idols. She could only hope to be able to sleep 20 out of the 24 hours a day and get away with it. I guess our chances for seeing a lion actually conscious was slim considering those odds.



Octopus! We showed up at feeding time so we could see the giant octopus devour a crawdad on a stick. Peter was a little disappointed when the "giant octopus" turned out to only be a few feet in diameter, but the keepers assured us that it would double in size within a few months. It turned brilliant colors during its feeding, and even inflated like a balloon, as you can see in this picture. At this point it has already trapped the crawdad against the wall and it used the webbing between its tentacles to keep it from escaping.



Onyx! I mean, Oryx! While we were writing this blog petero decided that this was an Onyx. That didn't seem right to me, so we looked it up, and I was right because he was wrong. (Even though I didn't know what it was.) A quick Google image search on "onyx" produced no long horned animals, so we found the correct name on the National Zoo Web site. Peter thought their long horns were funny, and he surmised that a great oryx gag would be to get your friend to suddenly look up at something and thus poke himself in the rump. Great fun for adolescent oryxes.



Pandas! This was the highlight of our trip! They were so fun to watch. In this picture you can see the two of them, but the second one is harder to see. The panda keepers were nice enough to throw the bamboo out near where the observation deck was so everyone could get a good view. We were surprised how big they were--they are the size of a real bear--and how human-like their movements were.



Pygmy hippopotamus! We thought he was rather unremarkable, but Arwen was so impressed, she wants one for Christmas. "I wanna hippopotamus for Christmas . . ."



Seal! We were impressed at how well he was trained. He went around in circles, never varying his course for the whole five minutes we watched him. And you think your life is boring.



Bear! Actually, it's a sloth bear. Whatever that is. Maybe it's just an especially lazy variety of bear. And he was lazy; we could barely see him most of the time we were looking at him, because he was curled up in the far back of the habitat. (Why don't those animals in zoos come out and parade around for the people to gawk at? They're very inconsiderate.)



Tiger! Tigers are bigger than you think. Watching their massive muscular bulk ripple as they pace is reminiscent of the Mighty Quinn's abs.



Zebra! Ok, this isn't a good picture, but we had to go from A to Z. These guys spent most of the day huddled in the back. They seemed a little nervous, as if a cheetah was watching from a few meters away. Which was in fact true.


We hope you find this blog half as funny as we do. If you ever have the opportunity to go to the National Zoo, you, too, can have as much fun as we did. Maybe some of the animals will be living when you go.