Mid-Week Zoo Outing

During the week between the Celebration and Miami marathons, I spent the week visiting with my snowbird mom. Among the things that we wound up doing was going to the West Palm Beach Zoo. While it's pretty small, it was uncrowded and a pleasant way to spend a few hours.

                    

This one fella kept pacing back and forth, while his companion in the other side of the pen was sitting stoically by the heating lamps.

Some of the lemurs in this area were moving about rapidly. Thankfully these fellas were a bit calmer, allowing for some photos.

This sloth being fed by his keeper was absolutely adorable. 

This koala was enjoying a nice nap.

This fella was very funny and quite friendly. Apparently, he likes to give gifts, so he was walking about occasionally with some small twigs in his mouth that he was hoping to give to the people on the other side of the grating.

Olan was the one of their three tigers who was "out and about" within eyeshot, though he was still a little tricky to see. They're in the process of redoing the walkways in the tigers exhibit for it to be more walkthrough for the walkways as opposed to two dead-ends.

Unfortunately the large iguana that looked like it was stalking this primate, decided to moving into the brush in the background when I was taking the photo, rather than continue on his previous path. I really wanted to see how the two of them would have dealt with each other.

Yes, that bag of needles is, indeed, a porcupine.

After seeing this rather large capybara, we went around the corner and came face to face with this adorable sea otter.

Shame I couldn't get better video where there wasn't any reflection of me visible in any of the view. Still came out fairly well, and that otter swimming by was too adorable.

When we first saw the crocodile on the right, there was zero movement - we couldn't even see him breathing at all. I thought it was a statue -- not dissimilar to several of the obvious sculptures they have sprinkled throughout the zoo. Lo and behold, he and the other croc (Fred and Ethel, respectively) are both indeed real.

This panther was pacing back and forth just like the leopard that we saw earlier. One photo that I didn't take was of the black bear that was slumbering soundly far away from the glass of his enclosure, where it would be an indistinct black lump.

All in all, while not the most exciting of zoos, and certainly low-traffic (well, it was in the middle of a school day, after all), it was still a good time. And only a few more days before I was finally on my way to Miami to pace the marathon.