The orangutans are indoors when it's chilly.
We saw the papa orang using a tool to scrape some sort of food (mashed fruit?) from the corrugations on the bottom of this orange thing. He had a piece of straw, it looked like, and he manipulated that straw with his lips. He fished the tastiness out of the crevices, and then flipped the straw so the yummy bit was in his mouth, then flipped it back out and scraped some. All with his lips. His hands and feet held the orange thing in position, but his lips did all the tool usage. Pretty clever and talented.
Naturally I took lots of pics of all that, and naturally, between the reflection on the plexiglas between me and him, and the relatively low light, and his movement, none of the pics are worth anything. I thought of using circles and arrows, but decided words would paint as good a picture, given the poor quality of my originals.
Sigh.
After he got every bit of goodness out of whatever the orange thing is, dad wandered off, and mom and bebe came over to this corner. There was popcorn in the shredded paper, which is why mama is apparently eating it. Her clever lips were picking popcorn out of handfuls of paper.
The id cards said this baby was a year old. It looked awfully fragile for that age, we thought. I know that other primates grow up faster than humans, and a human one-year-old would be sturdier and more mobile than this little one seemed to be. Maybe it was a different family on the id cards.....
Look how she's holding its little hand in her big one. Awwwww.
4 comments:
Adorable and fascinating. I haven't been to a zoo in a long time. Miss it.
We have maintained our Toledo Zoo membership even though the kid is now 19..... :-)
The Toledo Zoo does the best job it can of housing the critters -- giraffes have enough room to run, in their summer paddock, polar bears have been able to swim and dive for decades, and the zoo breeds cheetahs, which requires excellent care indeed.
The hippoquarium was (may still be) unique -- you can watch the hippos under water. Apparently where the hippos live in Africa, the water is so murky that you can't seen your hand in front of your face. In the much clearer water of the Toledo Zoo hippoquarium, researchers were able to learn things about hippo vocalization and behavior that they couldn't learn in the wild, because they could see so much more clearly.....
It is such a privilege to see other creatures with just a few inches of plexiglas in between. No one could get as close to a hippo in the wild (safely!) as we can be at the Toledo zoo. Tigers, polar bears, orangs (and other great apes).... More and more plexi separating us from the others, allowing incredible nearness.......
=^..^= oh Vicki!
These pictures are so wonderful ... All of them. But the very one that makes my heart flutter more than just a bit? The gentlness of one big hand caressing a tiny one.
You can clearly see how much momma loves her child. You have captured a precious moment in time.
::LuCkY:: you to be there to witness that!
=^..^= love, zU
It is so clear that humans are not the only ones who feel (or think) on this green Earth.....
I was lucky to see this moment, and even luckier that the camera managed to capture it! :-)
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