Houston Zoo
Yesterday we went down to the zoo in Houston. It’s in the city on the south side of Hermann Park. It’s a good sized park deep in the city, the museum district is on the north side and there is Rice Village on the West side of it.
The zoo was nice. It took all afternoon to go see everything and I’m pretty sure we still missed a couple of exhibits. I saw meerkats, a Kimono dragon and warthogs for the first time. All of which are cool. The kimono dragon was bigger than the alligator and crocodile they had (put together). And the crocodile was an albino. He thought I was cool too, must’ve been the hat. I was taking pictures of a lizard and I had the camera pressed up against the glass to block reflections. The little guy took off at a run to show that camera. But he ran out of rock and went splat instead. The children nearby thought that was pretty cool. Me too.
The landscaping is just as cool as the animals. They have these gorgeous live oak trees. The live oaks twist and bend every which way and they are huge. There were all sorts of bamboos and tropical plants in between them. It rained while we were there for about a half hour. Poured in fact, like it can only do down here in the sub-tropics. It really felt like we were in a rain forest then. We holed up by the tiger cage. He was most unhappy. He kept wandering about in the rain and going to the door. Wondering where those stupid humans were that take care of him I imagine.
There was this great big creature near the warthogs, looked like a rhino or something but wasn’t. He would go completely under water for several minutes come up for air and sink again. It was the strangest thing. * Note I heard from the zoo, someone read this post. They tell me the odd critter was one of three tapirs.
That odd animal near the warthog was probably one of our tapirs, which are related to both horses and rhinos. We have Brazilian tapirs..three of them..two males, Nick and Pico, and a female, Casaba. Pico is Nick and Casaba’s son, born in 2005. That may have been Nick you saw. He’s weighing close to 500 pounds now.
See also:
San Antonio Zoo
