On Saturday, June 17, my friends Deb, Jeremy, Franzi and I went to the San Francisco Zoo to see the white alligator on loan for the summer from the New Orleans zoo.  Back in the late ‘80’s, a clutch of alligator eggs was found in Louisiana, and about 14 of the babies were white.  It’s a rare gentic mutation and as far as they know, Antoine (the one at the SF zoo) and his siblings are the only ones alive.  Apparently, they don’t survive well in the wild because they’re easy for predators to see in the swamps where alligators live, plus they sunburn really easily.  So now that these alligators are fully grown, they tour the country visiting different zoos.  I'd had opportunities to see one the previous two years, and I kept saying I was going to go and never did, so this year I went.

The San Francisco Zoo is actually cool.  They participate in the species survival plan , breeding 11 species for the plan, among them Snow Leopards and Siberian Tigers.  They have a great explanatory sign for the plan, which features graphics like a Snow Leopard typing a personal ad on a computer, and another cat with a suitcase stamped with the locations of all kinds of famous zoos.  Apparently there’s quite a lot of shipping back and forth for breeding, which just conjures up all sorts of silly pictures in my mind.  I mean, can you imagine shipping an elephant across country for breeding purposes?  I think they must do a lot of AI.  I believe every zoo has something that makes them pretty unique, whether it’s have white lions like the Philly Zoo, or a baby giraffe like the Pittsburgh Zoo, or the Cheetah Habitat like St. Louis.  SF Zoo’s Cool Thing is the Feline Conservation Center, which features Snow Leopards, among other things.  They also have a Sumatran tiger, which is very rare, three koalas, three species of lemurs, an anteater, an albino kangaroo and regular kangaroos, and a variety of birds of prey.  They also had several types of animals I'd never seen or heard of before, including a cassowary, the aye-aye and the siamang.

We arrived just about the time the zoo opened, and decided to see the white alligator first thing, since he was the main reason we’d come.  So we headed that direction, and first we came to the kangaroo cage.  There we saw the albino kangaroo, who is very strange, but nifty, a poor little kangaroo with a cold who kept sneezing, and a baby kangaroo in its mother’s pouch, which was very cool but somewhat bizarre.  Sometimes his head would poke his head out, which was just fine, but sometimes you could just see a leg, and it rather reminded me of the aliens popping out of human stomachs in the Alien movies.  They also had an emu in the exhibit, and they do look like rather unkempt ostriches.  Sort of an ostrich with dreadlocks, I’d say.  They also had a sign which explained the different varieties of kangaroo.  Kangaroos are the largest varieties, wallabies are the smallest, and all the varieties in between are wallaroos. I’d heard the various names, but could never make sense of them.

Then we saw the white alligator.  He is definitely white with blue eyes.  We were talking about how the blue eyes made him seem much less crafty than the other alligators.  Intelligent, yes, but not so much like he's plotting to eat you.  They also have a broad-nosed caiman (caimans are very rare--only  about 2 species in existence.  Alligators are the most common of the crocodilians, with lots of species still around, then crocodiles with just a handful, and then caimans).  The caiman is definitely very evil looking, and not something I’d care to run into in a dark alley.  They also had a clutch of baby non-white alligators, which were really neat to watch as they're much more active than the adults.  They’re also really tiny.  These were a year old, and still under a foot long.  Apparently the mother protects them for up to two years in the wild.  We really got to see the way they swim around, using their tails as rudders and paddling occasionally with their feet.  It's really neat, and does look pretty much like you see in Disney's Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland.

Once we’d seen the crocodilians, we decided to continue around the zoo in that direction.  So the next thing we came upon was the harbor seals, who were, as always, absolutely adorable.  One of them was napping on the bottom of the pool, coming up every few minutes for air, and the other two were just swimming round and round, occasionally popping up their heads to look at the crowd.  Seals are right up there in my top 3 favorite animals, right along with cats and dragons, but I have to admit they weren’t my favorite thing at the zoo.  All they were doing was either sleeping or swimming in circles, and as Franzi pointed out, that gets boring after a while.

Next came the polar bears, although I thought it was cruel to put the poor seals next to their sworn enemies.  But then, the path kind of curved, and the bear pits had massive stone sides, so they probably couldn’t tell.  Polar bears are a fascinating animal to watch.  Unlike other species of bear, they are chronically unfriendly and perpetually wild, but they are extremely playful and remind me of nothing so much as great big dogs.  One of the Polar Bears was playing in his pool, and there were several different sized balls floating around, and he was just having a blast chasing them around.  At one point, he took the largest ball and put it on his nose, just like a seal!  And then there was a nice, meaty bone just on the edge of his pool, and he kept trying to get it, and finally had to drag himself half out of the pool, but he got his paws around it, chewed it a bit, and dragged it into the pool with him!

Next we got to the Cassowary, which is another flightless bird, which is really cool, with an nifty comb and a bright blue double wattle.  If you’ve seen the Discovery Channel show Walking with Dinosaurs, it reminded me of the more avian looking dinosaurs with brightly colored heads.  Also, like the Emu, an Australian bird.

Next we came to the Feline Conservation Center, which features Snow Leopards, including a female who just had 3 cubs.  They were in their house, though, so we didn't get to see them.  We did see one snow leopard who wasn’t in her house sleeping, though.  She was vegging out under a tree.  They also have a Puma (aka cougar, catamount, Mountain Lion, etc.), and several small cats I really hadn’t heard of.  Got to see the Puma, but the small cats were all in their houses.

Next we headed over to the rest of the big cats, passing the rhinos and the hippos on the way.  They had a new baby rhino, who was lying down near his mother and who you could just barely make out as not actually being shadows or a pile of dirt.  I would have missed him if I hadn’t read the sign and been looking for him.  The hippos were magnificent.  There were two of them dosing in the water, one sprawled on top of the other, literally with just their ears and nostrils showing.  Cool.  Then we saw the Sumatran tiger, which is very rare, but looks pretty much like your typical Bengal, the Bengal tigers, and the lions.  Then we headed over towards the primates and lunch, passing the warthogs on the way.  My parents went on an African safari recently, so they had pictures, but there was one big difference between those warthogs and the ones at the SF zoo.  The ones at the zoo are hairy!  Like long, light strands of hair all over their back.  It’s thin and sparse, but definitely hair.  They were having a nice, cool, mud bath.  Definitely reminiscent of my parents' dog who delights in finding all the mud puddles in the back yard!

By that time we were getting hungry, so we headed over to the food area to have lunch and then see the primates, which were located right by the food.  They had an enclosure of patas monkeys, 3 females and 1 male.  The nifty thing about patas monkeys is the male has a blue scrotum—a nice, pretty, sky blue.  Easy gender id!  Next to the patas monkeys were a whole bunch of different species of lemurs, most of whom were sleeping, but we got to see one white-fronted lemur.  They also had some aye-ayes, which are a type of lemur with a really strange middle finger for scooping insects and stuff out of tree-trunks and the ground.  It got its name because the natives from Madacasar were freaked out by the weird finger and thought it was giving them the evil eye.  They also had a teeny, tiny lemur who’s name I’ve forgotten, but he was asleep so we didn’t get to see him.  These were the extremely nocturnal lemurs, so their cages are in a little building, with the lights out during zoo hours so they roam around, and then, when the zoo closes for the night, the keepers turn on the light so the lemurs go to sleep.

The monkey area also included a whole bunch of black and white colobuses, which pretty much look like monkey shaped skunks with extremely long tails.  They also have some siamangs, which are just small gorillas.  Then there’s  a big enclosure of gorillas, including a baby.  It was really cool to see how human they act.  One adult was lying down with his legs crossed and propped up, and looked just like a human being lazy!  The baby was part human, part kitten in actions.  It nagged it’s mother, played with its food, and generally acted like a kid.  The kitten part involved playing with the food.  The mother was chewing on a big, leafy branch, and sometimes baby would grab a handful and munch, but he was much more interested in swinging on and batting the branch, which really reminded me of a kitten.

Near the monkeys was a falconry, where the keepers show off the birds a couple of times a day.  Sort of like the PA Ren Faire, but the birds are much tamer and they don’t fly them, and they have some different ones.  They have a bald eagle which are just majestic, and this was my first chance to see one so very up close.  They actually had a couple running free in the bird pond.  I guess they like it there.  They also had a Golden Eagle, which I hadn’t seen, and a snowy owl (very cool), and a red-tailed hawk, which I hadn’t seen up close although I see lots on the train to and from work—they’re very common out here--and a turkey vulture, which is just ugly.

Then we headed over to where the penguins were, because it was close to feeding time.  But we were early, so we stopped to watch the river otters.  The river otters, like the polar bears, were being playful.  There was this piece of tubing, and one of the otters kept crawling through it and darting out the other side!  Only sometimes, he wouldn't shoot straight through, and you'd just see this little nose peeking out.  Very cute.   I think the otters were probably my favorites.  Normally it would be seals, hands down, but these seals were just swimming around in circles, and was quite a let down after seeing them in the wild in Alaska, especially have seen the babies on the breeding ground.  But otters are fun, and I like them.

We also caught the big cats as they'd been brought in for feeding time, and several of them were playing.  One of them had a water cooler bottle on a string, and she was just attacking that nasty cooler for all she worth!  Her teeth went through it several times!  That was one thing that was neat--a lot of the toys for the animals were just common things being reused, like the cooler, or the otters' tubing, or the cardboard box another lioness had.  I thought that was pretty nifty.  Sure, replacement rate is high, but those are things you're using pretty much constantly anyway.

Then we watched the penguins.   It was very funny to see them line up and wait for food.  Several greedy ones kept following the keeper around.  They I guess have them marked, and they were basically calling penguin roll, which I found amusing.

Other than that, we saw  some Koalas (we just got to see their old male--and he was asleep, so it was just a lump of fur), an anteater (they're knuckle walkers--it's really cool--they have the strangest front feet!), and the insect room in the children’s zoo, which was mostly mounted exhibits.  Very interesting, but they pretty much lumped arachnids, insects, millipedes, etc., all together, so it was also major creepy crawly.  They had a lot of animals from the area, including CA river turtles, black-tailed deer, and the San Francisco Garter Snake.  Plus a petting zoo that Deb and Franzi went through and enjoyed, but Jeremy and I opted for a snack instead (I was dying of thirst).  Then Franzi rode the merry-go-round, a Denzel Menagerie .  We found out that Deb has a carousel maker in her background Illions (which I think I may have butchered), who's also a fairly well known carver, although I get the impression Denzel carousels are the most common these days.  I think they were in business longer and more recently (which is not to say very recently!).

By then we’d seen everything, so home we went!