A Good Day at the San Diego Zoo

We took our nephew Chris and his wife, along with Heather's father, to the San Diego Zoo on Saturday. It was quite crowded, which we had expected, so I dropped them off at the front and went looking for a place to park. It's a good thing I had plenty of fuel, I had to drive around for 45 minutes before I found a spot. They made it down the Tiger Trail and past the hippos before I caught up. It was a good day though, we saw quite a bit.


The pandas were sleeping (which is normal) when we got there, but then the new baby decided to get up and go looking for a snack.

We had equally good luck at the polar bears, where one of them was playing in the water with a large blue ball that he would toss like a basketball up onto the rocks, then grab it as it fell back into the pool and toss it again.

I couldn't get close enough to make the chain link fence completely disappear, there were just too many people in front of me when I took this shot of the lion. It was pretty much a quick snap as I was walking past, just happened to catch it just right.

We hung out with the meerkats for quite a while

The koalas were a lot of fun to watch, this little baby one was climbing all over the place, and the mother was moving more than any koala I've ever seen.

From the koalas we went over the to the mesa where the rhinos and giraffes are, then headed down to what used to be called Cat Canyon, and is now known as Big Cat Trail. It's tough to get a good picture of the big cats, and it's kind of depressing to see them cooped up in those cages, even if the enclosures are fairly big and well landscaped. The mountain lions were napping when we first got there, but then the female decided to get up and move a bit. A few minutes later a woman in a wheelchair came up, and the mountain lion went crazy. She (the mountain lion) was growling, snarling, hissing, salivating and all sorts of other stuff as she tried to stalk the lady in the wheelchair. The woman's daughter pushed her back and forth across the exhibit, and the mountain lion followed intently, never diverting interest for a second. This was one time I really wished I had a video camera.

This peacock was a crack-up, he was doing his best to impress a duck that just wasn't all that interested. 

All in all it was pretty good day for a walk around the Zoo, even with the parking nightmare and the crowds once you got inside. We stopped into some of the lesser visited corners too, and there it was nice and quiet.


Click here to see more from our trip to the San Diego Zoo on Saturday, June 5, 2010.