2007 Anniversary Trip : The Indy Zoo

I love to bring my camera to all the little trips we go on but sometimes I forget that I have it until we're already well into the first exhibit. Such is the case here as I forgot to take a picture of the front gates, so all you get is this craptacular little tile from the indyzoo.com site showing the entrance to the zoo and the White River Gardens at right :

Anyways. The Indy Zoo was a very pleasant surprise. I wasn't expecting much but I think the management at the zoo has done a really excellent job of getting you as close to the animals as possible without disturbing their natural habitat too much.

We started off in the Shark Exhibit and I need to make a confession. I don't care how much science and facts you throw at me about how they're not really dangerous and all even if you throw a big bathtub on the floor and ask me to pet them, my response is the same : No Thanks, and get those little monsters away from me. For the record, my wife took these pictures because I refused to get within ten feet of the exhibit. And no, I'm not kidding.

Thankfully, we left the Shark Exhibit and strolled into the Penguins. With the exception of Batman, I see little to be afraid of with Penguins. Here's a great example of how the zoo really outdid themselves to allow the people and the animals to interact. The penguin exhibit exists on two sides of a hallway. The penguins can and do frequently swim underneath the hallway to the other side and pop up onto the rocks. Really neat.

As we headed outdoors, we got to witness a rather unfortunate view of a polar bear.

I'm not sure but I think he was trying to tell me that if I posted that picture on the internet he was going to come hunt me down like a salmon. Meh.

Next up, and mostly for my son, we took about 13,000 pictures of ducks. They set up a nice little duck pond right next to a food court which serves two purposes : it gets the people close to the animals and it gets the ducks REALLY fat. I can't tell you in the 90 seconds that we stood there how many potato chips I saw this little girl feed to the ducks. Tough life, having someone throw chips at you all day.

I didn't really understand this clock set-up but it looked interesting so I took a photo of it :

Visible in the backgrond of the clock picture are flamingoes!

Someone needs to bust out the weed whacker. These things are out of control!

The ostriches were a bit far away but I managed to get this zoomed pic :

The giraffe family had a recent addition :

The rhinos needed some shut eye :

The Lions were having a bad hair day (boy do I know how that goes...)

The primates were having some private social time. I got several angry stares when I used the flash. I think they were playing poker.

Here again is an example of really good structural planning. They built a bridge over this exhibit so the zebras could walk right underneath you. This one looked almost close enough to touch :

Parent Elephant trying to show Baby how this snout thing works :

I WOULD have had a really amazing kangaroo shot, but some little brat walked RIGHT up to the fence and screamed at it until it ran away. The parents laughed and egged the little brat on. I unclenched and took this shot instead :

From there, we walked around a bit more and then as things started to get busy, we headed over to the White River Gardens which was much better (again) than I was expecting. More on that in another post.