As I mentioned in yesterday's blog post, I went to the Denver Zoo Wednesday afternoon to take a few photographs, with mixed success. The sun played hell with getting a decent exposure, but happily I was able to get a photograph of the male orangutan Berani hanging out with his young three-year-old daughter Cerah. The mother expectedly died about a year ago, and Berani stepped up to take care of her, to the delight of the zookeepers. They are now inseparable.
This was an excellent day to visit the zoo if you happened to be a dentist and were looking for a busman's holiday. I took the photograph of the lion in the photograph on the right giving a big yawn between naps. Lions tend to sleep between 16 and 20 hours a day, and spend most of the rest of the time eating, kind of like teenagers during the summer, and so I was lucky to get that shot.
On the other hand, the hippo in the photograph on the left simply likes to play with it's toys in the water on hot summer afternoons. To me it looks like it is playing with a large plastic buoy, which got me thinking about Stuart, Florida, and the buoys in the rivers there. Florida has been in the news lately because it is being overrun with huge pythons that pet owners have released into the Everglades after they get to be 20 feet long or so, making them a bit unmanageable. It would have been much better if they had adopted baby hippos, and then released them into the water when they got too big to handle. That would have made for a tremendous tourist draw. And that gets me thinking about lions, too.
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