(no subject)
I been to the zoo.
The Prospect Park Zoo, near my house, is little and cute. Their main attraction, the charismatic mega-fauna that all the kids crowd around, are the sea lion. Other than the sea lions, the zoo is primarily a set of dark, heavilty air conditioned building filled with elusive crowd pleasers--poison dart frogs, walking sticks, and tamarins, which are monkeys wearing the faces of insane wizards. I stood in many windows looking up, down, around, and sideways, trying to find an animal in every cage, and almost always succeeding, as I did not when I was younger, because I can stay still for longer and have so much more patience. I found the frog that looked like a fat leaf and spent 5 minutes trying to get one little kid to see it, with the help of his older brother. He said he saw it in the end, but I'm not sure if he really saw the frog or merely said he did so that we would leave him alone, poor kid.
There was an arts festival happening over the weekend, and a dancing troupe had come to practice their performance. They moved about the zoo like animal, cocking their heads to the side, hooting, hollering, moving fluidly and the suddenly stopping, frozen, as if listening, or as if threatened. When they began to hoot, it was not even a surprise, but a natural outgrowth of the movement, the interaction, the sneaking quiet intensity that drew eyes from across the zoo. It was, in many ways, more intense than a performance; they were obviously acting spontaneously, having fun, enjoying the play of body and sound and movement and doing it for each other, not for the audience, not for us, only for themselves. They were all over the zoo, hooting on lampposts, swimming like fish, leaping like something, I'm not sure what, but I just stood, watching open mouthed, transfixed. To move like an animal...
Then I walked through the discovery path, where animal activities have been scaled for children--I walked over lily pads like a bird and refused to lie down in the goose' nest, because unlike a goose my feathers don't dry so quickly.
The next part was supposed to be full of kangaroos, but I entered at the same time as a group of screaming children, and between the noise and the heat the kangaroos were nowhere to be seen. But once the children were gone I stayed to watch, and I saw something strange behind the trees--deer. I had seen many deer, I knew what deers were like, and these were deer, brown, heads down, long faces--but why would there be deer in the kangaroo pen? Was I missing something? Then the figures moved out a bit, and I realized that they were, in fact, kangaroos. They moved in a way I had never imagined, not hopping on their hind legs but walking like they were using crutches, planting their tiny front arms and then vaulting their enormous rear parts forward, a halting sort of step that was nevertheless very quiet and efficient. Their ears moved independently, twitching back and forth, eyes alert to the world. I watched them for a long time. I've seen kangaroos before, but always in empty, barren fields where they were too shy or hot or bored to really do their thing. Here, with room, with shade, they seemed almost like different animals, and I was seeing them for the first time.
I watched the baboons for a while. The one so much in heat that it looked like she had a giant pink pillow attached to her ass was very strange, and the subject of much attention from one of the male baboons, apparently an ass man. But the baboon that I watched the longest was trying to get a drink. There is a mini-river in the baboon habitat, along with a mini-waterfall and a mini-splash pool.
One baboon stood near the waterfall with her head back, mouth open, trying to catch the few spilling drips from the sides of rocks, occasionally getting a drop in her mouth, but more often the drops hit her eyes, so that she shook them off vigorously, there-by destroying her positioning and losing any chance of getting a drop. She tried this over and over, moving around, attempting different combinations and tactics, but never attaining more than a drop or two of water in each effort. You have to figure that she has spent most of her life in this enclosure; you would think that she would have discovered a more efficient way of drinking by now. The very sweet teenage volunteers pointed out that they thought it was a game; I hope this is so, because otherwise I would have to revise my estimates of the intelligence of baboons.
I went to the zoo to see how it was set up, if it was a modern zoo with naturalistic conditions or a sad collection of animals in tiny cages; I must say that in general I was impressed; the animals seemed content an cared for; most of the animals looke (to my completely untrained eye) as though they had about as much room as they could want. Except one kind--the birds. There were two raptors in a tent of wire net less than 20 feet high. They could not fly, seemed barely able to move. Perhaps birds should not live in zoos; if you have the freedom of the sky, how much worse must it be to barely even be able to stretch your wings? And really, who wants to see birds anyway? Leave the birds in the sky. I'll keep my zoo full of woods, and shade, and kangaroos.
The Prospect Park Zoo, near my house, is little and cute. Their main attraction, the charismatic mega-fauna that all the kids crowd around, are the sea lion. Other than the sea lions, the zoo is primarily a set of dark, heavilty air conditioned building filled with elusive crowd pleasers--poison dart frogs, walking sticks, and tamarins, which are monkeys wearing the faces of insane wizards. I stood in many windows looking up, down, around, and sideways, trying to find an animal in every cage, and almost always succeeding, as I did not when I was younger, because I can stay still for longer and have so much more patience. I found the frog that looked like a fat leaf and spent 5 minutes trying to get one little kid to see it, with the help of his older brother. He said he saw it in the end, but I'm not sure if he really saw the frog or merely said he did so that we would leave him alone, poor kid.
There was an arts festival happening over the weekend, and a dancing troupe had come to practice their performance. They moved about the zoo like animal, cocking their heads to the side, hooting, hollering, moving fluidly and the suddenly stopping, frozen, as if listening, or as if threatened. When they began to hoot, it was not even a surprise, but a natural outgrowth of the movement, the interaction, the sneaking quiet intensity that drew eyes from across the zoo. It was, in many ways, more intense than a performance; they were obviously acting spontaneously, having fun, enjoying the play of body and sound and movement and doing it for each other, not for the audience, not for us, only for themselves. They were all over the zoo, hooting on lampposts, swimming like fish, leaping like something, I'm not sure what, but I just stood, watching open mouthed, transfixed. To move like an animal...
Then I walked through the discovery path, where animal activities have been scaled for children--I walked over lily pads like a bird and refused to lie down in the goose' nest, because unlike a goose my feathers don't dry so quickly.
The next part was supposed to be full of kangaroos, but I entered at the same time as a group of screaming children, and between the noise and the heat the kangaroos were nowhere to be seen. But once the children were gone I stayed to watch, and I saw something strange behind the trees--deer. I had seen many deer, I knew what deers were like, and these were deer, brown, heads down, long faces--but why would there be deer in the kangaroo pen? Was I missing something? Then the figures moved out a bit, and I realized that they were, in fact, kangaroos. They moved in a way I had never imagined, not hopping on their hind legs but walking like they were using crutches, planting their tiny front arms and then vaulting their enormous rear parts forward, a halting sort of step that was nevertheless very quiet and efficient. Their ears moved independently, twitching back and forth, eyes alert to the world. I watched them for a long time. I've seen kangaroos before, but always in empty, barren fields where they were too shy or hot or bored to really do their thing. Here, with room, with shade, they seemed almost like different animals, and I was seeing them for the first time.
I watched the baboons for a while. The one so much in heat that it looked like she had a giant pink pillow attached to her ass was very strange, and the subject of much attention from one of the male baboons, apparently an ass man. But the baboon that I watched the longest was trying to get a drink. There is a mini-river in the baboon habitat, along with a mini-waterfall and a mini-splash pool.
One baboon stood near the waterfall with her head back, mouth open, trying to catch the few spilling drips from the sides of rocks, occasionally getting a drop in her mouth, but more often the drops hit her eyes, so that she shook them off vigorously, there-by destroying her positioning and losing any chance of getting a drop. She tried this over and over, moving around, attempting different combinations and tactics, but never attaining more than a drop or two of water in each effort. You have to figure that she has spent most of her life in this enclosure; you would think that she would have discovered a more efficient way of drinking by now. The very sweet teenage volunteers pointed out that they thought it was a game; I hope this is so, because otherwise I would have to revise my estimates of the intelligence of baboons.
I went to the zoo to see how it was set up, if it was a modern zoo with naturalistic conditions or a sad collection of animals in tiny cages; I must say that in general I was impressed; the animals seemed content an cared for; most of the animals looke (to my completely untrained eye) as though they had about as much room as they could want. Except one kind--the birds. There were two raptors in a tent of wire net less than 20 feet high. They could not fly, seemed barely able to move. Perhaps birds should not live in zoos; if you have the freedom of the sky, how much worse must it be to barely even be able to stretch your wings? And really, who wants to see birds anyway? Leave the birds in the sky. I'll keep my zoo full of woods, and shade, and kangaroos.