This July is shaping up to be the coolest July on record for St. Louis. I took advantage of the cooler weather last weekend to visit the St. Louis Zoo on Saturday, Shaw Nature Center on Sunday. Following is some photos from the Zoo trip.
The lake at the Zoo attracts its share of wild birds. I was surprised to see this Wood Duck with three ducklings, as I thought the breeding season was over.
The St. Louis Zoo had an exceptional year when it came to zoo babies. As a Christmas treat, I give you the cute, the furry, the frolicking, and the fun.
Kalama was born in August, 2008. There are now only 2,200 Grevy's Zebras in the wild, but there's a healthy population in zoos. The same can also be said of our next baby, a giraffe who was famous literally from birth.
Read on...
The St. Louis Zoo is a favorite place of mine, but the web site for the Zoo doesn't provide all the back stories to the animals. Or at least, not as many as I would like.
Happily, I spotted a story on the Amur Tiger cubs' father, Khuntami by Dr. Jeffrey Bonner, in St. Louis Today—the latest in a year long series on the Zoo. I asked the St. Louis Today for links to the other articles, and the site was kind enough to link the others in.
This is a wonderful series, which I now see is also linked more prominently at the Zoo site. What I especially like about the series is that it focuses on the Zoo's conservation efforts, rather than the "entertainment" items, so many other zoos feature so prominently. For instance, the Amur tiger cubs are winners with the public, true. How could they not be? What's more important, though, is that the Amur tiger is one of the rarest cats in the world, and these five tiger cubs are especially critical for the program to save this endangered cat. The cubs' father, Khuntami, was born in the wild, and orphaned as a cub. His genetic contribution to the Amur Tiger breeding program has been invaluable in the desperate attempt to save this beautiful cat.
But yeah, OK, they are cute little buggers.
More St. Louis Zoo photos.
Earlier this week I made a mid-day visit to the zoo to see our five newest St. Louis citizens: the five new Amur (Siberian) tiger cubs. They're only allowed out a couple of hours a day, but in that time they manage to cover ever inch of their not small habitat at least a dozen times.
The habitat is viewed from above, as the side view is blocked by the zoo train. Needless to say, the numbers of people were many and access to get a clear photo, limited. However, you don't have to have a good photo when you're taking pictures of tiger cubs.
