Brandon's Puppy

Zoo-tastic!

We live so close to the zoo that we decided to purchase a family annual pass in October. The weekend before last Brandon, Matt and I went with my friend Angie and her daughter, plus some of her family. It was her daughter's first trip to the zoo, as well as Matt's. This past weekend, Eric and I took the boys for a couple of hours. Here's a quick recap of both trips.

Trip 1:
The first animals we saw were the flamingos, closely followed by the tigers. Check out this one, looking like he's ready to pounce. Then we went to visit the Siamang Gibbon apes.Here they are, making their calls. It was really cool the hear them, we hadn't experienced that before. Here's a bit of info about their calling habits (makes sense, we were there around 11AM).
We then rode the monorail system to the further end of the zoo, and walked to the giraffe feeding station, but not before passing the African elephants. We were awed by this baby rhino following around its mommy around their exhibit. Next up were the gorillas; if you look closely on the left side of the picture, you can see Brandon and Emilie on the inside of the viewing cave. After that, we had lunch around 3PM, and headed home.

Trip 2:
This week, one of our first stops was the Asian elephant exhibit. We arrived just in time to see this girl do some tricks for a treat. We then headed towards the Wings of Asia Aviary, which was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and has been completely rennovated. The entrance to the aviary includes a dinosaur exhibit, where our own archeologist had some fun. Inside the aviary, we saw a bunch of beautiful and interesting birds, both large and small. We thought this black and white duck was absolutely adorable, and we were very eager to see if this guy would give us a better view of his beautiful feathers. He was a bit shy I suppose, because he just stood there, looking at us.
We then headed to the Children's Zoo for a quick visit to the petting zoo and lunch around 3:30PM. Brandon was anxious to feed the giraffes again, but the feeding station closes at 4PM and we just didn't make it over there on time. So that was the end of our most recent visit to the zoo, and this guy was sweet enough to greet us near the exit. =)