African Spurred Tortoise

(aka the Sulcata Tortoise)

Sulcata tortoises inhabit the southern edge of the Sahara.  They are the architects of their habitat:  their burrows provide housing for a plethora of other animals.  Unlike most other tortoises, they do not hibernate.  They are the largest mainland tortoise, weighing between 70 and 100 pounds as adults, and can live up to 80 years.  The species is considered vulnerable.

Both Laurie and Jim have been raising one of this kind of tortoise.

Allen’s Swamp Monkey

and Child

This is your basic swimming primate.  As the name suggests, they live in swamps.  They have developed a bit of webbing between their fingers and toes, but I’m sure that would in no way have anything to do with evil-ution.  They are related to guenons, but are not in the same genus.

Swamp monkeys, who live in social groups with as many as 40 members, live in the countries of the former Belgian Congo.  They eat fruits, leaves, beetles and worms.  The genus is classified as near-threatened.

We paid for priority parking at the zoo, not wanting to repeat any mistake from the previous day.  Priority parking turned out to be not too far from the front gate, which we saved a lot of time passing through since we had already purchased our tickets.

We immediately got in the queue for the guided tour.  The zoo’s set up is quite a bit better.  The guided tour lets you know what’s where and your ticket will allow you to take express buses the rest of the day to whatever part you desire to see.

And we managed to see quite a lot of it, from the entrance to the top of the polar bear “plunge” (which, being up, not down, is in my opinion vastly misnamed).  I’m afraid I almost gave up a couple of times on the climbing parts.  I was saved by an escalator system and a special bus that runs up the hill.  From there you can take a sky tram back to the exit.  Or you could catch the tortoises and the sea lion show close by it.  Your choice.

I had a limit to the number of photos I could take.  The camera allowed between 50 and 55.  That’s not as many as I would have liked to have.  I got no photo of the massive takin, the “goat-antelope” of the Himalayas, the national animal of Bhutan, in the very last exhibit at the top (that’s a hotlink from wikipedia to the left).  Neither did I get a shot of the tiny dik dik from Southeast Asia, smallest of the antelopes, right across from it.  Now that I am writing this piece, I regret that.

I’ve broken my set of photos, supplemented by some taken by Debbie’s cousin Laurie, into four groups, trying to make the essays more accessible to folks using dial-up.  Ungulates and their Friends will be followed by Lions, Tigers Cats and Panda Bears on Saturday, Primates, Bears and Flashes of Color on Saturday and finally Tortoises and Trained Sea Lions on Sunday.  The schedule is extremely tentative.

So on with the show, good health to you…

We had a plan.  Or someone came up with a plan.  I don’t exactly remember being consulted about the plan.  But I was amenable to the plan.

We left Hesperia on Sunday and drove down I-215 and I-15, through Moreno Valley and Temecula Valley to San Diego.  That route passes right by (almost) San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park, which is just a bit east of Escondido, so the plan was to stop there on the way to our temporary headquarters in SD’s Hotel Circle.  We purchased tickets that allowed us access to all three venues (the Wild Animal Park, the San Diego Zoo, and Sea World) for five days, though we weren’t planning to stay that long.

It was hot.  Africa hot.  Which I’m sure the African animals appreciated.  I didn’t.

PS:  That’s a Javan rhinoceros (aka unicorn) to the left.  The hint about why it is included here is inside.

[22 photos included]