It's That Day Again...

... Lump Day!

And who does Lump Day better than a panda?

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The Heat Just Keeps On Coming

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Bamboo--My Favorite!

As I have said many times before and will no doubt continue to say many times, I love pandas for the absolute delight they take in eating. Here is a species whose members must eat voraciously, prodigiously, every day, in order to overcome the inefficiencies of their digestive system. How easily could they become bitter and unhappy, brooding and protesting their lot in the life! And yet instead, they are perpetually thrilled by the opportunity to eat more bamboo.

Each time I visit the zoo, I watch the pandas approach what could be perceived as an onerous task with the glee of a gourmand, and their excitement and good cheer is infectious.

There must be some kind of moral in there, but I’m not going to try to find it. I’m just going to go get some of my favorite foods, so I can enjoy them as much as a panda would.

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Sometimes You Get Tired of Bamboo

What should I see this weekend but a panda—with every evidence of enjoyment—eating bunches of grass?

It was something of a shock to see Tian Tian plunging into the tufts of greenery and pulling out vast swathes of them to nosh on:

But then, bamboo comprises only 99% of a panda’s diet, after all: it would have to eat something else at some point. Especially since, according to the zoo’s website, their diet in the zoo includes “rice gruel” and “a special high-fiber biscuit.” That’s enough to make anyone turn to ornamental grasses for sustenance, if you ask me.

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Some Days Are Like That...

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Food (for Thought)

I had been planning to write a substantive, thoughtful sort of post today, but what with allergies, the weather, and a bout of mild (but not mild enough) insomnia, I just don’t have the energy to be all that interesting. So instead I’ll post a few photos from the weekend, when the zoo’s pandas were eating bamboo with their typical gusto.


I do admire that about the pandas. I mean, they have to eat a lot of bamboo: unlike other herbivores, like goats and cows with their complex, multiple stomachs and suite of helpful cellulose-breaking-down bacteria, pandas have a pretty inefficient digestive system (much like ours), and so they have to eat an enormous amount of bamboo in order to absorb enough nutrients from their food of choice. Their diet isn’t composed exclusively of the stuff (according to the zoo’s website, in the wild it also includes “occasional small rodents or musk deer fawns,” which I find a little disturbing to contemplate), but the vast majority of their meals is in fact bamboo.


Now, if this were my fate, I think I might become kind of…well, tired of bamboo. I might be a little blasé about receiving the newest batch of stems; I might yawn a bit as I faced my breakfast, or lunch, or dinner. Not so the pandas.


Each time I see them eating, they look as if they’re doing what they love most in the world—their expression, each time, seems to say, “Bamboo! My favorite!” Each time, they chomp away in what appears to be absolute bliss.

You have to admire—perhaps even envy—that kind of gustatory delight.

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The Unexpected

Last week, as I passed the panda enclosure, I saw something I’d never seen before. Not only was the panda (I think it was the male, Tian Tian) not eating, but he wasn’t even on the ground!


I’m not sure what he was up to in the tree—maybe some very ambitious scent-marking?—but it was great to see the branches sway and swirl around him as he moved up and down the trunk.


Soon enough, though, he tired of the exercise, and with supreme nonchalance, as if it were something he did every day, lowered himself out of the tree and continued with his panda-y business.

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Even in DC...

…It sometimes snows. Having been born and raised in Michigan and having lived in Boston for a number of years, I have a certain degree of cheerful scorn for the panic with which people in and around the District respond to a whole four to five inches of snow. Nevertheless, I concede that it is fairly hard to get around here when it snows even a little, since nobody seems to have any idea what to do about this white stuff falling from the sky. Except the animals at the zoo, of course.

Not all of the animals are outside when it snows; the lions and tigers, for example, are kept in, and some warmer-weather creatures like the lemurs and anteaters and small-clawed otters have been kept in warmer indoor areas for over a month now. But most of the residents of the Kids’ farm stay out and about, although they don’t always look too thrilled about it:


And of course, there’s always wild wildlife to be seen:


But what impressed me yesterday was seeing the panda, lolling about outside--although, admittedly, not in the snow:


--And, most of all, the red panda, who was curled up unconcernedly on a branch as the snow started…


…and who stayed there as the snow continued falling, its thick fur protecting it from the cold:

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Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ll just moralize briefly about the fact that it’s always worth considering the plight of other species as well as our own on Thanksgiving, and thinking of what we can do to help them—be it giving money to a conservation group, planting more native wildflowers in spring, or being more careful with our resource consumption/waste disposal.

Okay, enough of that. Since Thanksgiving doesn’t have a specific visual theme (except eating), I’ll just post some images of zoo life in autumn:

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Battle of the Charismatic Macrofauna

“Charismatic macrofauna,” as some of you may remember, is the term used by biologists (at least, the ones I spend time with) to describe those species of animals that are large (or larger than the majority of animal life on the planet, such as insects, parasites, krill, etc.) and considered cute by almost everybody. These species are often used as poster animals for conservation causes, since most people have greater emotional interest in saving an adorable bear than a lichen. –But this is all peripheral to the subject of today’s post.

I happen to have a number of photos of a few species of the zoo’s charismatic macrofauna, and while I will probably post entries about all of these species at some point, I wanted to ask you, my readers, which you’d like to see first.

So, would you prefer a post, with plenty of pictures, about:

Pandas?


Ring-tailed lemurs?


Asian small-clawed otters?


Or red pandas?


(Bear in mind that the quality or cuteness level of these particular pictures does not represent the general cuteness level of the photos I have for each species; in fact, I’m deliberately tantalizing you with my less-than-best images of these guys.)

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One Shot: Panda

Is it just me, or is this panda smiling smugly? (Just what kind of complicated bamboo caper is this bear planning??)

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“I’ve Been Saying it for Years: Don’t Get out of Bed!”

(Not my line but that of a friend, Goldie Greenstein.)

Unfortunately, there have been very few times in my life when I’ve obeyed that injunction—but they’ve been good times. Other animals, though, seem much more capable than we are of following that advice. Even wild animals, who have to find food and mates, care for their young and avoid predators, seem to better able to appreciate the value of resting than we do. Of course, they also don’t have television.

In any case, there’s nothing like seeing animals enjoy a good snooze to inspire you to sleep in:








Happy Labor Day, everyone!

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Odds and Ends

No, there won’t be any photos of animal tails or behinds to illustrate this entry; I’ve used that joke once already, and I think that’s probably more than enough, at least for this year. But there were a few photos and brief anecdotes that I wanted to include at some point, and a Thursday just seems like a good day to do that.

First, the tortoises were at it again Tuesday morning (though not, thank god, making any noise):

[this image has been blurred to protect the identities of those involved]

—Although, on Wednesday, they acted all innocent, nesting in the straw:


(Their behavior gave me the idea for a new phrase, “finding a tortoise in a haystack,” which would probably be a lot simpler than the proverbial needle: maybe that could be used to describe tasks of only moderate difficulty? E.g., “Finding this mystery novel in the paperback section is like finding a tortoise in a haystack.” As opposed to tasks with no difficulty at all, like, “Coming across a TV show whose gender/race/class stereotypes annoy me is like finding an orca in a haystack.”)

And, of course, yesterday after I had posted my entry I got better pictures of the cheetah (or another one—how would I know?), but I’ll include only one that is less technically perfect but more amusing—to me, at least:


Finally, I stopped by the pandas the other day only to discover that this panda had apparently dropped its wallet:


You never know what you’ll see at the zoo.

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