I'm a FONZ!

One of the things that appealed to me about moving to D.C. right off the bat was the zoo. Some of you may not know that I was raised in a zoo, the London Zoo. Actually, my mom worked there when I was young, so I spent a lot of time around the zoo, both with the regular tourists and behind the scenes.

D.C. has a pretty nice National Zoo (Of which I've recently become a Friend - hence FONZ). K, J, P and I all went yesterday.

We met by Lemur Island, which has a small island, but no lemurs to speak of. I want my free admission back!

K and I had already scoped out the sea lion - or perhaps seal - area. I can never remember what's supposed to distinguish one from the other. Either one's adorable-looking though so I took a picture.

Little known fact about sea lions: they're avid Technorati.com users.

I think I cheated by sneaking over to a hole they use for feeding these guys. I probably tricked him into coming over and posing by looking suspiciously like a Guy With Fish.

If you're reading this, I'm sorry man.




Time for a Zoo quiz
See if you can work out which one of these right-facing animals went for margaritas after the zoo (answer at bottom of page):

Señor Nibbles - A loaf of rodenty goodness


Myself, a smug zoogoer with a nose for
margaritas.


John Q Lookout, seen here turning a brave eye toward the future with unflinching
dedication to searching out the dangers that threaten our noble country.
A presidential meerkat if ever I saw one!


We also saw this tiger burning brightly . . . .

And got admissions from some members of our group who, while still quite young, thought that lions and tigers were the male and female members of the same species. I think that's not such an unusual misapprehension.

Ex GF redacted for her privacy's sake

Here we see a primate uncharacteristically unimpressed with K.

I'm pretty sure that both apes in this picture are females. One I'm dead certain on. The other I had to judge by size and demeanor. Out of shot in this picture, the gorilla is watching Oprah.

When we wandered into the great ape house, we got a show of two gorillas wrestling. It reminded me of an older and younger brother insofar as one clearly wanted to be left the hell alone and the other wanted to show off how strong he was. All went well until the larger one tried to put the smaller into a sleeper hold. Then the younger one got properly pissed off and started chasing his agressor around. Fun was had by all, not least the audience.

Speaking of the audience, there were a lot of people at the zoo, it being Memorial Day weekend. Some were well behaved and intellectually curious. Others were mouth-breathing peasants who smacked their hands on the glass, startling the elephant shrews, and demanding a show.

Contrary to its name, this animal hardly nagged at all

Poor elephant shrew.

I'm fairly certain these slack-jawed yokels weren't Friends Of the National Zoo. More like grudgingly acknowledged acquaintences of the zoo, but not anyone it really likes - you know, just people it'd be rude to ignore since their mums know each other and so on.

The benefits of being a polite and curious FONZ though, is that volunteers take time out of their busy days to show you stuff you wouldn't expect to see normally.

For instance, we went to the hall of invertebrates for the 3:00 giant octopus feeding! Awesome! The first volunteer we ran into was narrating the feeding. He was quite nice even if he did answer a question about how big the octopuses get by citing Wikipedia.

Since I was standing right next to him, I took the opportunity to ask him about cuttlefish.

I only just learned how amazing these little bastards are. Mostly they look like slightly dopey squid. However, if you tease them with food, watch them for hours, or get pulled into their world by a Discovery Channel documentary, you'll soon find that they're astonishing. They change color better than any other animal, and in fact, they can change not just the color but the texture of their skin to blend into almost any surrounding. Check the kids, one may be a cuttlefish! Crazier than that though, they sometimes use their color-changing abilities to flash and dazzle their prey.

Anyway, he pointed me towards a cuttlefish in a tank nearby and I went over to try and encourage it to do something amazing. Cuttlefish, like octopi, have eyesight that's as good as ours. That means you don't have to whack their tanks to get their attention. I just waved my finger about and it started to track it.

Then a new volunteer came over and we began geeking out about cuttlefish. I'd seen the aforementioned documentary, so I talked the talk. At this point I was angling to get him to feed one for us. We did our little dance. He was excited to talk to zoo-goers who actually gave a damn about the animals. I asked, nonchalantly about the next feeding. One thing led to another and he popped behind a curtain only to show up with a piece of shrimp to feed to the cuttlefish.

My only regret is that I was so engrossed by the whole process, from meeting the very friendly volunteer, to seeing the cuttlefish grab the shrimp with its feeding tentacle, that I forgot to take pictures or shoot video. My bad.

So, the zoo was fun. I encourage D.C. ers to become FONZs. Jess and Phil did, and they're both wicked smart, so you probably should too.

I'll be going back in July to see the free ranging Golden Lion Tamarins.

*Answer to Quiz about margaritas: "Señor Nibbles. The Mexican name should have given it away. His full name is Juan Nibbles, of the Oaxaca Nibbles. He got surly though and tried to cut Phil. We had to pick his drunk ass up and carry him home. Hope your head's okay Juan!"