For my sister-in-law Barb, a rarely seen beaver cavorted in the pool. For my college roommate Tracy, the tiger and leopard cubs frolicked extra-hard. Each of the past two weekends, as a nonvolunteering “civilian,” I’ve taken a friend to the zoo. Both Tracy and Barb spontaneously bought me coffee at the Penguin Cafe, but otherwise the two outings — though equally delightful — could not have been more different.
Here’s Barb two weeks ago with one of the Minnesota Trail’s most elusive residents. It’s as if this furry rodent knew that Barb was a former Brookfield Zookeeper in Chicago, that she was in town just briefly from another state, that she frequented the Minnesota Zoo in its early years and that one special appearance deserved another.
We had a little less luck with the zoo’s trio of young cat species: the lynx kitten goes off-exhibit after lunch, the leopard cubs were hanging out near the back of their space, and the tiger-cub launch was still two days ahead. But it was the perfect day for hiking the Northern Trail, with head coverings and large coffees to take the edge of the sunny chill. And the dholes, which can be hard to spot in their roomy woodland home, graced us with an eyeful. Since this month’s volunteer update, I know all their names (though I don’t know which adult this is, at left): females Piri and Fanni, males Blyger and Prosit (who’s chubbier) and three female pups: Astrid (reportedly the smallest and boldest), Csilla (pronouned Chee-yah) and Janka.
A week later, for Tracy’s visit, everything had changed: gray skies dropped a warm drizzle, the beaver had returned to invisibility, the Northern Trail was too wet to walk in full — but all the baby cats were out in force. The lynx kitten kept to the top of his exhibit, but you could still see his cuteness. I’d heard the tiger cubs might go back inside if it rained, but there they were — just a headless wrestling blurry ball whenever Tracy and I pointed our cameras at them, but distinct enough when they ventured out from beneath their umbrella of trees. They’re prowling alongside the window less often now, but I think the cub below was drawn to a visitor’s neon sneakers.
Tracy describes me as a docent in my zoo life, which of course is what I am, though at the zoo we tend to call ourselves interpretive volunteers instead. (We do have a sense of kinship with the Association of Zoo and Aquarium Docents, or AZAD, however.) These past two weekends, I was a partly-off-duty docent, free of any scheduled commitments but still irrepressibly shouting out animal information, asked-for or not. Force of habit guarantees that when I’m in my “natural habitat,” as I like to call the zoo, animal-fact eruptions happen. Bringing friends into that habitat just makes it feel even more natural.
creatures, trees & water 