San Diego Zoo fun

My parents came out to see the museum and the town before we all headed back to Long Island.  We had a great time out in Ocotillo, but Monday we did a little exploring in San Diego.  We checked out the San Diego Zoo and then drove up the coast to La Jolla where I got to see the Pacific Ocean.  It's amazing how, within a few hours drive, you can get such different scenery.

Meerkat!

The zoo was much bigger than I expected it to be, and has a really amazing variety of animals.  We saw meerkats, grizzly bears, polar bears, all the big cats, and some of my personal favorites: Striped Hyenas, New Guinea Singing Dogs, African Wild Dogs, and Maned Wolves.  Part of the zoo is right up against a middle school- it was a little weird to be looking at camels while listening to kids playing basketball on the other side of a giant fence!

Polar bears enjoying a mild December

We went early so we managed to avoid school groups and small children for the most part.  The polar bears were amazing. They're huge! There is an underwater viewing area for them so we got to watch one of the bears in the water up against the glass playing with a ball and really entertaining himself with it.  The New Guinea Singing Dogs were beautiful, with great brown eyes, and you could get up pretty close to their enclosure. They are pretty shy and sensitive to noise apparently, but one of them came up to the fence to check us out.  I'd never heard of them before, but they are now on my favorite animals list!

New Guinea Singing Dog, posing for the camera

Their two nearest neighbors were already on my favorites list: the African Wild Dogs and the Striped Hyenas.  Few people I've met agree with me on how amazing and cute hyenas are, but these guys were great.  It's too bad the zoo didn't also have spotted hyenas, which I sort of think are even cuter than their striped cousins. It's probably the only time I'll see a hyena in person, so that was one of the highlights of the trip for me.

African Wild Dogs, one of my favorites

As impressive as the variety of animals is at this zoo, I have to admit there were times when it couldn't compare with our zoo in New Orleans.  The maps weren't good and you never could tell what exactly the zoo had until you walked up to it, so you couldn't know if you were missing somebody completely awesome or if the map was just stupid.  They didn't even have a good overview of the animals you could see on their website, which you'd think would be a big deal.  The enclosures weren't great, many were much smaller than you'd think the animals would need, and many didn't really seem to be what the animals would be living in if they were in the wild.  Lots of mesh fences instead of the kind of pit and overhanging fence arrangements Audubon has.  And few educational plaques telling you about the animals you were looking at, beyond their species and where in the wild they can be found.  Maybe I'm just spoiled from how great Audubon is?  Although not even Audubon can be counted on for having members of the weasel family, beyond otters.  What kind of zoo doesn't have a whole section dedicated to mustelidae and how awesome they are?  At least this zoo had hyenas.

My personal favorite and the highlight of the zoo: the Striped Hyena. Isn't she cute?