Wild Animals

Last Christmas (yes, almost 12 months ago!), our good friends John and Grayle gave us a gift of a “photo safari” at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Just this past Wednesday, we finally scheduled it. The photo safari is a very interesting and unusual sort of thing: you get onto the back of a small flat-bed truck, outfitted with rails, seats, and a canopy for shade. There’s a driver and a guide (Josie and Jeanne for our safari), both very knowledgeable not only about the biology (which we expected), but also about the history and lore of the individual animals (and that we didn’t expect). It lasted almost four hours, and at the end of it we were fairly tired — certainly not from physical exertion, but more just from the intensity of the experience. It was non-stop, wall-to-wall close encounters of the animal kind for the entire trip. And I took a lot of pictures — only about one in ten are posted here! In fact, there are so many pictures that I’m only going to mix a few in with the text; the rest will all be at the bottom. As usual, you can click on any photo for a larger version.

We arrived an hour or so before the photo safari started, so we decided to just wander around a bit. We hadn’t been to the Wild Animal Park for five years or so, and the map showed quite a few changes. Our plan was to go check out the new things, but a park employee mentioned to me that there was a baby lion in the nearby nursery, and it was just about time for it to be fed. That sounded way too good to risk missing, so we practically ran over to the nursery — and ended spending all our free time there. Koza, the baby lion, was only four weeks old — and so cute it oughtta be illegal! I didn’t want to risk a flash upsetting Koza, so I didn’t take any pictures of him. He weighed 11 pounds; to us, his most striking feature (especially as compared with house cats) were his truly enormous front paws. His behavior was practically identical to a housecat kitten of the same age, just on a very different scale. We envied the caretaker, who had the wonderful job of delivering some attention and loving to Koza. Debbie would give just about anything for a chance to do that, I think…

After the pleasant interlude with Koza, we walked a short way to the administration building. The caravan was scheduled to leave from there at 10:30. As we walked in, Jeanne (our guide) walked out to meet us, and told us the news we were hoping to hear: that we were the only people on the photo safari today! I had carefully planned the particular date (with some help from the Wild Animal Park staff) to (a) maximize the probability of good weather, and (b) minimize the probability of too many other people joining us. Each of the trucks can hold up to about 15 people, and they have six trucks — so you could (if you were unlucky) have as many as 90 people along with you. That would be a much different — and much inferior — experience as compared with ours. It was just the four of us: Josie, Jeanne, Debbie, and myself. What also helped was that Jeanne and Josie figured out pretty quickly that they didn’t need to be careful or circumspect around old farmers like Debbie and I — we just all had a nice time together. It was very cozy and friendly, not really much different that an outing with particularly well-informed family or friends…

Now I completely forgot to take a picture of Josie and Jeanne, and that’s a shame, because you’d probably like to see them after you hear the rest of this. Josie (our driver) has an email address that proclaims her to be a fox, and we’ll agree with that (even though she’s missing that bushy red tail <smile>). And Jeanne (our guide) has an email address that brags about her hiccups (which we didn’t experience, but heard stories about). What an interesting job they have, doing these photo safaris! I can imagine that it is sometimes rewarding, and sometimes frustrating (depending on who your customers are) — but no matter what, you get out to see and know these exotic animals every day. We heard some stories about people who actually went out and then wanted to come back early; 'tis hard for us to imagine, as despite being almost four hours long, it was over all too soon from our perspective.

The variety of animal and bird life we saw was a bit overwhelming. There must have been three or four dozen mammal species we saw, and a couple dozen bird species. The truck was a great way to see them — we could (and did!) get very close even to animals that would have been quite dangerous had we been on foot. Yet we never felt threatened in the slightest, even with gazillion-pound rhinos bumping up against the truck. And being in the open air meant perfect visibility — no windows to interfere with seeing or photos. We also learned some things that surprised us, such as the fact that a giraffe’s front hooves are quite heavy and dangerous — and that they swing their heads about as weapons (which is why their heads have bony protuberances all over them). We were only allowed to feed two kinds of animals (giraffes and rhinos), and we could only touch one (the rhinos). Debbie had a lot of fun feeding both of them (as you can see in some of these photos). Personally I was more interested in getting that kind of close to some of the members of the goat and sheep family, or the antelopes — there were a lot of them I found to be quite beautiful and interesting..

The first thing we saw as we left on our safari was an island full of chimpanzees (Bonobos). In the photo at right (an extreme telephoto), if you squint and use your imagination, you can see that the adult female is tending a small baby. This mother didn’t let this baby off the leash (she used her arm and hand as a leash and collar). There was another, older youngster who scampered and played up a storm — lots of fun to watch.

Our safari took us through several paddocks (three, I think), each with animals from a different part of the world. Jeanne told us what all of them were as we drove around, and interesting little tidbits of information about each — and of course we forgot almost all of it, almost immediately. But we sure enjoyed the style — not at all the monotonous monolog one so often finds on guided tours, but rather a very interactive talk, with answers to our questions in as much depth as we could handle. What I most enjoyed was the stories — such as the history Jeanne told us of a Chinese deer called the “Pere David” deer, after the friar who discovered them. It seems that they existed only on the emperor’s grounds, until Pere David and some other Europeans asked for some animals. The emperor had plenty of them, and so was happy to make the Europeans happy with a few deer — and it’s a good thing he did, because after various disasters in China, most of the living Pere David deer were in Europe!

Well, that’s about enough yakking. Now it’s all about the photos…

PowerPaws

For four days last week, Debbie and her girlfriend Sharon took their dogs (Mo’i, in Debbie’s case) to a training camp called “PowerPaws”. This was a pretty intensive effort, with 8+ hours a day of actual field work with the dogs. Debbie was very tired when she called me each night, and she tells me that Mo’i was tired too — and that takes some doing!

Anyway, the photo at right is of Debbie and her classmates (Sharon was in a different class, with more accomplished handlers and dogs). My lovely bride and our studly dog Mo’i are at the lower left.

Spitzer's Galaxy

From APOD, another amazing image:

Gaze through the dusty plane of our Milky Way Galaxy in infrared light. The cosmic panorama is courtesy of the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) project and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The galactic plane itself runs through the middle of the false-color view that spans nine degrees (about 18 full moons) across the southern constellation Norma. Spitzer’s infrared cameras see through much of the galaxy’s obscuring dust revealing many new star clusters as well as star forming regions (bright white splotches) and hot interstellar hydrogen gas (greenish wisps). The pervasive red clouds are emission from dust and organic molecules, pocked with holes and bubbles blown by energetic outflows from massive stars. Intensely dark patches are regions of dust too dense for even Spitzer’s infrared vision to penetrate.

Click on the thumbnail to get a tasty, large portion…

Reminder

This letter (published in this morning’s Wall Street Journal) from four ambassadors to the U.S., from countries that were part of the Soviet Union until just a few years ago. It was such a good commentary on the meaning of the successful elections in Iraq that I’ve reproduced it in entirety:

Iraq’s Future, Our Past

By RASTISLAV KACER, PETR KOLAR, JANUSZ REITER, and ANDRAS SIMONYI

When it comes to tyranny, we believe we can offer some personal experience. After all, it was only a short while ago that our countries emerged from Soviet oppression. During the decades of dictatorship, our peoples' attempts to restore freedom and democracy were crushed. Who would have thought in 1956 in Hungary, in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, or in 1980 in Poland, that we could get rid of the dictatorial regimes in our lifetimes and shape our own future?

The memories of tyranny are still alive in the minds of many Czechs, Hungarians, Poles and Slovaks. We also remember the challenges we faced early in our democratic transition. It is a testament to the resilience of our peoples that we are where we are now — members of NATO and the European Union, and strong allies of the U.S. We got here by believing in the transformational power of democracy and a market economy. But we needed others to believe in us, too. We could not have made it alone. We needed the perseverance and support of Western democracies for freedom finally to arrive.

The attainment of our immediate goals of stability and prosperity could have made us complacent. It has not. We feel that as free and democratic nations we have a duty to help others achieve the security and prosperity that we now enjoy. That is why we have been part of the coalition to help democracy emerge in Iraq.

Establishing democracy in Iraq was never going to be easy. Yet it is essential for the political and economic stability of the entire Middle East — and also vital for the security of our countries. We are convinced that for Iraq to become a vigorous partner in the war on terrorism, the Iraqis will need our continuous help for rebuilding their country, as well as for establishing democratic institutions and a market economy. The good news is that we are not alone; it’s a truly international partnership, based on a U.N. mandate. More than 30 nations are on the ground with the coalition and NATO, and more than 80 have signed up for the “new international partnership” with Iraq. European countries work closely with the U.S. on strengthening stability and democracy in Iraq, and the U.N. is providing key support to achieve our goals.

The Visegrád Group, which includes our countries, has been one of the most effective regional partnerships in Europe established after the changes of 1989. With our vast experience in transitioning from dictatorship to democracy, we can be of special help. Although the Central European reality is quite different from Iraq, we offer our assistance in building democratic institutions as well as civil society. We can share the successes and challenges of our transition with the Iraqis, as we all know that freedom comes at a price. The experiences from the area of responsibility of the Multinational Division Central-South prove that transformation in Iraq can be completed with success. Right now we are transferring more power and responsibilities to the local Iraqi authorities, which, thanks to our assistance, are capable of securing their future.

Democratic transition is a long, painful process. It requires sacrifice. But, more than anything, it requires a belief that democratic values will prevail and people will have a better life as a result. We had that belief to guide us during the most difficult years of transition and we want to keep that belief alive in the people of Iraq. Maybe it takes countries with vivid recollections of tyranny to serve as the institutional memory of a larger community of democracies. If so, we are ready to fulfill that role.

Messrs. Kacer, Kolar, Reiter and Simonyi are, respectively, the Slovak, Czech, Polish and Hungarian ambassadors to the U.S.

"…we got here by believing in the transformational power of democracy and a market economy…"

Words for many liberal, anti-war Americans to ponder the real meaning of, and to consider there applicability to Iraq. I cherish them…