A Day At the Zoo: Sleepytime Edition

Let me start this post by apologizing for the craptastic quality of some of these photos. It was crazy sunny today, so I couldn’t see what I was taking pictures of. As I was scrolling through to edit some of the photos, I realized there were a lot of photos of animal enclosure walls and not of the actual animals themselves – oops 😀

One of the best parts about working at the zoo is evening access. When people clear out of the zoo, the animals can finally take a breather away from the noise and bustle of the public.

Basically, it is immediate snooze-ville.

Here, for example, is the bear cat curled up in the shade. It’s a blurry picture so it’s kind of hard to tell where his features are. (The curled thing sticking up is his ear.)

The buffalo, too, were all curled up together in the biggest piece of shade they could find.

If you couldn’t tell at this point that I was in the American Animals section of the zoo, then may I introduce Frank and Earl, our most patriotic cast members…

Frank

Earl

I feel it is only fair to the zoo that I mention the fact that their names are not actually Frank and Earl. I don’t know what their names are yet, but I just felt like they looked like a Frank and an Earl.

Next would theoretically be pictures of grizzly bears that I took, except I only got pictures of walls because it was too sunny and I was blindly shooting overly zoomed-in pics. Here is one blurry (attempted) photo of a grizzly bear hugging a rock, and an equally bad photo of a very sleepy grizz.

I couldn’t decide which pictures I wanted to save for last, so in the end, my selfish desire for wanting you to think I could take a semi-decent photo won out. But in terms of the best content, here are my favorite pics from the evening:

When viewed in sequential order, you can see the progress of prairie dog cuddles ❤

And, lastly, but certainly not least, I give you lemur swag.

Clearly ain’t no one got more swagger. (He even crossed his legs!)

I told you there would be some zoo pictures eventually!

As I get more acclimated to my internship I will make more of an effort to go out and take pictures for you guys. My goal is to hopefully get some really good pics of our wolves – they were hiding today – and to figure out some of the animals’ names. Today was crazy hot, so I didn’t really stop long enough to read any of the signs.

And just for amusement’s sake, I am including below animal pictures from my own house. This is the hawk, Tony, who lives in my backyard and loves the bird bath, and the ridiculously brave, sunbathing red squirrel who decided to have a stare-down with him the other day.