Zoo Day (No 2)

Knowing that the Zoo Class started at 10:30, I took the later bus, which deposited me at the Zoo gates just on time. I came in the gate just behind a bunch of other ladies ‘of a certain age’. The Zoo is on a hill. A steep hill. The Lecture Theatre is half way up the hill. The ladies took off up the hill and did not stop. I couldn’t keep up with them! I was fair puffing and peching and getting hot and bothered, divesting myself of hat, scarf, jacket… I think it might be wiser to take the earlier bus and do my usual amble up.

The speaker today was a stand in - whoever was meant to be there wasn’t - so the young lady in charge of the monkeys in the Bondongo Trail gave us a talk about animal welfare and some of the research done there. The talk was short and quite interesting, but not riveting. But when she took questions at the end, she relaxed and just chatted about their characters and some of the experiments, which was really good.

One student had devised an experiment with two sticks which had to be fitted together to reach the food, but the chimp went outside, stripped off excess twigs and leaves from a long enough branch and came back in to get the treat - chimps think outside the box!

They do language research too. Some capuchins from Germany were recorded making a danger sound for ‘EAGLE!’ or ‘SNAKE!’. The Edinburgh ones had the same danger calls. One old capuchin always got the two alerts mixed up, but the others knew he did. So when he gave the alert for ‘SNAKE!’ the others would look up. When he gave the alert for ‘EAGLE!’ the others looked down. Fascinating.

Another thing I didn’t realise is that you can donate old clothes to the monkeys - they remove buttons and zips and the chimps just love them! One lovely piece of material was fought over for weeks - with the dominant chimp lying on it, legs and arms splayed out to stop other chimps sitting on it. Though they all tried to tug at the corners. There are lots of other things to donate, not just to the primates. See here.

I spent ages with the penguins - they were all wooshing up and down their long pool. They are lucky penguins indeed. As the chap said last week - animals in the wild have a horrible time. One big penguin stood looking at me, inches away through the glass, with his arms wings out. I took loads of photos, but unfortunately the glass was pretty grubby.

Loads of school kids milling around yelling. I was looking at the otters and a bunch of kids arrived yelling. I hope it doesn’t sound like I don’t like kids, but I really think they need to know when it’s appropriate to have loud voices and when it isn’t.

I moved on to the meerkats. They are always charming. So the obligatory meerkat shot today.

I think they've just spotted a bunch of very noisy small humans heading their way. ALERT!


PS Eeeek! Last year I held a tarantula!! --------------------------------->