Tiger Through the Trees

Last Sat­ur­day morn­ing, Veron­ica and I headed to Madison’s free Vilas Zoo. We met our friends Yi Hong and Steve there shortly after open­ing time, hop­ing to beat the crowds. Lit­tle did we know that the Green and Gold Train­ing Camp was going on that morn­ing, and hun­dreds of lit­tle Pack­ers fans and their par­ents had descended on the zoo. Luck­ily, the crowd mostly stayed occu­pied with things other than look­ing at the animals.

Iguana

Although we’d been to the zoo a cou­ple of times before, we’d missed out on a few ani­mals and areas. This was the first time we saw the tiger in its enclo­sure; pre­vi­ously, there had just been signs up say­ing “Exhibit Closed.” We also ven­tured into the her­petar­ium, in which you can get pretty close to some of the snakes and rep­tiles (see left). A new Children’s Zoo with a play­ground and carousel opened a year or so ago, but we hadn’t real­ized that the area actu­ally houses more ani­mals — a red pan­das, a pair of meerkats, some white cock­a­toos and a huge African porcupine.

Click the pho­tos above for larger ver­sions, or check out the whole gallery here.

Swim­ming Bear

A lit­tle over a month ago, Veron­ica par­tic­i­pated in the Zoo Run, a char­ity 5K/10K run/walk ben­e­fit­ing Madison’s Henry Vilas Zoo. I tagged along to pro­vide moral sup­port and to hang out at the zoo while she ran. We arrived at the zoo fairly early, so we had some time to walk around and look at the ani­mals. Most of them were just wak­ing up them­selves, and weren’t very active. A notable excep­tion to this was one of the polar bears. He (I’m mak­ing an assump­tion based on size) was pass­ing time by swim­ming laps in a small pool within his enclo­sure. A small water­fall pours into the pool, and he seemed to like swim­ming under that on his back. Upon reach­ing the other end, he’d swim back under­wa­ter and repeat the process. Only once did we see him get out, and the only briefly. He shook off some water, walked around a bit, then did a belly slide back into the pool for some more laps. I’d like to think that the bear looked happy as he was glid­ing through the water, but I can’t imag­ine that such obses­sive behav­ior is a sign of good men­tal health.

Stand­ing Flamingos

I watched the begin­ning of the race, then went back to wan­der the zoo. By this time, the ani­mals were becom­ing a lit­tle more active. I walked by the polar bears again, and the big one was still swim­ming. I also stopped by the giraffes, pen­guins, flamin­gos, and a few oth­ers. The lions were asleep in a secluded part of their enclo­sure, and none of the other big cats were on dis­play. I didn’t have a whole lot of time, so I didn’t ven­ture into the aviary, the rep­tile house, or any of the other enclosed exhibits.

Run­ning Librarian

I thought that I’d timed my mean­der­ings so that I’d arrive at the fin­ish line a few min­utes before Veron­ica (the race route formed a loop, so I had far less dis­tance to travel than did she). But, she beat her goal time by so much that I missed her! I man­aged to snap a few pic­tures close to the start of the race, but unfor­tu­nately none at the end. After the race, we went home for some from-scratch blue­berry pan­cakes, which she’d cer­tainly earned (and which I cer­tainly hadn’t). Click any of the pic­tures above to see the whole gallery.