Raining Kangaroos
Saturday, June 3, 2006
cortneyandjon in Zoo

It is, perhaps, an amazing, if not miraculous, truth that in all of our zoo visits we have only ever been rained on twice.  Until today it had been once, but now it has been twice.  Of course we knew we were stretching our luck when the forcast called for scattered thunderstorms throughout kangarootrail.jpgthe day, but we just didn't know how many more Saturdays we would have to make a trip like this before Raspberry makes his appearance, so off we went.  And we did the zoo backwards today, too.  Usually we head straight for the tigers because they are most active right away, but today we headed straight for the back corner of the zoo to see the kangaroos.  That new exhibit really is a lot of fun.  Since it was still cool, and since there weren't too many people in the exhibit yet, the kagaroos were a very rewarding first stop.  Several of them were highly active, joeyhead.jpghopping right across the path and coming within feet of us.  One specific, and rather large, male was a major camera hog.  While we were looking in another direction he snuck right up next to us so that when we turned around he was about four feet from us.  Four feet!  No zoom required for that photo.  Since we didn't get to see the joey on that trip through we also visited again later and that was when we got caught in a downpour.  Did you know that kangaroos hate the rain?  As it started to sprinkle every one of them stood up from their reclined positions and looked at each other, then headed straight for the shelter aardvarkdirt.jpgin a big train - don't get in their way!  That provided our best view of the joey poking his little head out of mom's pouch, but he was still pretty far away, hence the blurry zoom and crop.  It was worth getting wet anyhow.  And, just so that you don't think we spend all of our time in the kangaroo exhibit...here's a picture of the aardvark.

Article originally appeared on Cortney and Jon Ophoff's Family Site (http://www.theophoffs.com/).
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