Trapped!

I was really hoping to take a walk in the zoo this morning, but I woke to a sky that was disorientingly black, as if it were still the middle of the night, and ominous rumbles of thunder that soon gave way to torrential rain. They sky eventually lightened slightly, but the rain hasn’t, so here I am…

Something to mention about gibbons, though, since I just put up a picture of one: I was walking through the zoo a couple of months ago early on one of those days that the zoo closes early so as to prepare for a special (paid-for) event, the kind where you have to put up lots of little tents and attractions and so on. And I heard this weird video-game noise: “BOOooooo-eeeeeeEEEp; BEEEEEEEE-oooooo”—etc. It wasn’t a construction noise, which the zoo’s had plenty of, too, so I assumed that some kind of video game or other machine has been brought in for the event. Until I passed by the gibbons, that is, and realized that this guy here was actually making these completely mechanical noises:


It was pretty amazing. I’ve heard animals make strange noises before, but never ones that seemed so blatantly artificial.


(She was less than excited about it, though):