Meerkat Family at Werribee Open Range Zoo

Meerkat family at Werribee Open Range Zoo recently welcomed two new additions. A coworker of mine told me about it after seeing it on the news. I made sure I visited within a week to see these sweet little fuzzballs who grow up rather quickly. Both pups were suckling much less on my second visit. I saw one of the pups eating something solid. It was very keen not to let any other meerkat get too close!


A perched meerkat with its eyes shut - albeit temporarily - is a rare sight.


Week 2.






A chilled out sentry.

Mali in the City: celebrating 150 years of Melbourne Zoo

Mali is the first elephant born at Melbourne Zoo. To celerate 150 years of Melbourne Zoo, lifesize, fibreglass sculptures of the baby elephant Mali were painted by 50 different artists. The sculptures were then dotted around Melbourne's CBD for 6 weeks, and then displayed for another month at the zoo itself. More about it here.

I didn't see all of them up close but these guys did.

Here are my shots:

A Pattern of Orange-bellied Parrot
Vanessa Bong (sponsored by Queen Victoria Market)
at Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne



Ming Vase Elephant
by Brian Cheung (sponsored by ecoFuture)
at Queen Victoria Market

I was chatting with a lady who said she travelled about to see the sculptures and that this was the best one she had seen. I was very impressed by it myself. I didn't endeavour to see more because I suspected that I had seen what I would conclude was the best one too. It's hard to convey the tonal quality of this piece in a photo.




Detail of side facing wall:

My Meerkat Experience at Mogo Zoo

From J: the best Christmas present EVER :) Mogo Zoo, NSW, Australia offers various Animal Encounters, one of which is a Meerkat Experience. All of these photographs and the short clip were taken by zoo keeper Bek/c while I enjoyed feeding my favourite little peeps. Bek/c took heaps of photos for me so I'm only including some.




[sings]Getting to knooooow you,
getting to feed you stuff from a bucket.



The dominant meerkat of the five boys spent most of the time with his head in the bucket except when meal worms were brought out...




... and put on my head, shoulder and lap.


It didn't hurt, but it took a bit of getting used to having this little critter run his paws and claws through my hair. Their claws are very long but dulled by digging and foraging.


Call me back later, I'm feeding the meerkats!


My favourite photo of us.


Their fur is a not as soft as a cat's but not as coarse as some adult dogs. Afterwards my hands smelt spicy and earthy - sort of like curry powder or maybe tumeric.


Keeper Bek/c said this was the cutest pic she had ever taken of this little chap. He is the oldest meerkat of the five, at nine years old. He was once the head male. Not anymore, he sat apart while the others did their thing. So sweet though as you can see by this pic.


I don't remember his name but here he is again...


...and here too.


The four amigos sun bake in a line. Apparently the keeper had never seen them lying in a line like that before.



Please M'am, may I have some more?

Precious little pygmy marmosets

At Mogo Zoo we were admiring the agility and cuteness of the pygmy marmosets. A boy of about 8 walks by and excitedly asks his older brother of about 12
"Can we order one of those?!"
"Yeah sure - they're six million dollars!"

Attenborough's Madagascar

More on the Rhone Glacier and vintage postcards

I previously shared some vintage postcards here, one of which was of the Rhone Glacier.
Here is a tunnel through it:

c. 1925

Here's one through another glacier which doesn't look a lot safer to transverse.

c.1925

This is what a modern tunnel through the Rhone Glacier looks like: a nice, even board walk and lighting included!

Finally here's a sad little postcard from Geneva's Bern Zoo bear pit, which fortunately is no longer open. The photograph looks slightly doctored to me, with three of the bears having extra sharp edges and the corner bricks in the wall is a bit curvy when I suspect they should be straight.

Bear pit at Bern's Zoo, c.1925

Bern has a history of bear pits and bear keeping but they no longer keep the bears in pits. Bern Zoo's new bear enclosure will open later this year. It will feature growing vegetation and a river from which they can catch live fish. In captivity, it doesn't get much better than that. More here.

[smiles] Doing a spot of research to enhance the posts featuring images has been very interesting indeed!

A day in Singapore

We spent one day there to minimise our jet lag when we arrived in Spain. It wasn’t too hot and humid fortunately. There isn’t a lot to do there apart from look at shops.

At one shopping complex on Orchard Road there were two large aquariums full of tropical fish and some small sharks. In the first one we observed strange behavior in two little, yellow fish and a lone shark. The two fish were swimming together being pursued by the shark who would occasionally open its mouth a little wider. We watched this for several minutes. After lunch, hours later we happened to come past this aquarium again. They were still at it. We concluded that they must be really bored and this was a way for the three fish to relieve that boredom through a mock pursuit. We dubbed this, the TFE: TriFish Entourage. TFE = another term for bored


TFE*, drawing enlarged
pencil

While walking along the waterfront precinct we came across a laneway which had three giant, white, plastic (?), phallic objects. Definitely a WTF moment. Walking around to the back of them didn’t make it any clearer.



We’d never seen anything like this before. Walking along further we came across some more. I noticed a small white streamer blowing in the breeze from of the rear, eyeball socket holes. Aha, it’s a from of climate control ... in an uncontained – save for the roof – outdoor space. They didn’t feel like they were doing anything in terms of comfort levels. Perhaps it would be more obvious in warmer weather. What a disgusting waste of energy. The shape was amusing at least.

At Barajas airport in Madrid we saw similar vents but their housing wasn’t phallic and they were inside the building.

We checked out the world’s first – and possibly at this point, only – night zoo. The Night Safari zoo opens at 7:30, which is when the sun virtually always sets in Singapore. It closes at midnight. It features an assortment of mammalian nocturnal animals, and at least one reptile (a large python). There are several types of wildcat including tigers and leopards, lots of possum-like things such as bush babies, fruit bats, various hoofed animals, rhinos and tapirs.

No flash photography allowed. Might as well not bother bringing a camera you say. No, because there are some funky animal light sculptures outside the zoo that made suitable subjects after our visit.



Unfortunately there are no postcards of the animals, or any merchandise featuring photographs of them. This was surprising given that there are enough on their website and brochure.

I recommend forking out a little extra for the tram ride tour, as it will take you around most of the zoo fairly quickly. It stops at one place for you to get out and explore on foot. You get to come face to face with fruit bats. You’re in their enclosure and at times you may need/want to duck as they fly over you. They have a flying squirrel but it didn’t oblige us with a flight that night. It was content to sit in the shadowy fork of a tree and peer down at us.

There are three, count ‘em, that’s 3 otter exhibits plus they’re also in the Creatures of the Night show. They provide what has to be the world’s cutest demonstration of how easy it is to recycle. Towards the end of the show after a couple of raccoons raid a rubbish bin they put out 3 recycling bins. One for paper, one for metal and one for plastic. The contents of the raccoon bin are scattered on the ground. Two otters scurry out and start putting things in the recycling bin.


Recycling Otter, drawing enlarged
pencil

The metal recycling otter was reluctant to let go of his/her one tin, repeatedly chewing at it, and popping it in the bin only to half hop into the bin to retrieve it and chew on it some more.


Recycling Tin Otter, drawing enlarged
pencil

Finally a third otter, Pedro I believe, comes out to put away the plastic.

Website for the day
Official Night Safari Site


* I guess I should mention that these are my pencil sketches, drawn from memory. I've got one more from Madrid, and a pen sketch for Barcelona.