A Wild Animal Park informational recap

I'm home now, after a crazy trip back yesterday. It was a better trip that I could hope for, but I'm glad to be home again. My elephantiasis has returned, my tummy is sore, and I think I could sleep for a week. Luckily, I planned ahead and booked this week off of work too, so all I have to do is to nap, putter around the house and play with all the pictures I took.

I thought I'd start with The Wild Animal Park pictures, since I learned so much there and would like to retain some what I heard.

Before we start, let me introduce you to our tour guide:
Doesn't he look just like Wentworth Miller?

Very knowledgeable guy. He will forget more than I'll ever know about animals; but unfortunately I couldn't pay attention to everything he said. I'm mostly deaf in one ear, which means that I have to either pay attention when people are talking to me, or I don't retain anything. While Wentworth had very interesting things to say, I was distracted by the animals. For that reason, I don't know the names (species) of most of the animals we saw. I wish there was a list of the WAP resident breeds so I could go back and and figure out who is who.

There were giraffes. Lots and lots of giraffes. I am now in love with giraffes.

As soon as we drove into the first enclosure, this guy pegged us as a source for free lunch.
So, we stopped to feed him.

Lesson #1. Be The Tree. Stand still, hold the leaf and let the giraffe take it from you. Giraffes, while generally docile, can get defensive if they feel threatened, and since their head's are their primary weapons in the wild, they get defensive of movement around their faces.

Wentworth showed us how to do it:
And we all took turns feeding the giraffe. It was really neat.

Their fur is kind of prickly, almost like a short haired dog.
Their tongues are rough, like a cat.
They don't have front teeth.
Their spit is really thick to protect them against prickly trees, so even when they wrap their tongues around your hand to take the leaf, you don't come away all slobbery.




I could go on all day about giraffes, but eventually the tour moved on.


And encountered these guys:

See the marks on their faces? Those are called threat masks. Apparently, they're supposed to scare away the lions.

Also notice: baby in middle of circle.
The black one in the back is the male. Males tend to be darker than females. Also, the darker they are, the more dominant they are.

Cool antlers, Dude.

White Tummies are to help them keep cool. If their tummies were dark, the sun reflecting from the ground would be more readily absorbed and make them overheat.


There were lumps of rhino dispersed throughout the park as well.

We'd drive right up to them quite a few times before many of us realized that they weren't big rocks. They blend in well with their surroundings.



To a lion, this guy would blend in, almost as well as the rhino.
Lions are colour blind, and red and green are the same in grey scale colour. The redder an animals is, the greener their environment. Cool, eh?

This one didn't seem to care about blending in. She was just vegging out at the side of the road.

They look like characters from star wars, don't they? Jarjar Binks has nothing on these guys.


This guy lost a horn while scrapping with somebody else in the herd.

It's unfortunate, because it won't grow back. However, in the wild, this might be something of a good thing. Man is a huge threat to these animals, and if he had a set of matching horns, he'd be more likely to end up with his head mounted on somebody's wall. So conservationists/biologists are going in and cutting off some horns of endangered species in the wild, to make them less desirable to man.


This little critter is only two days old.


He/she didn't budge a bit while we were nearby. The herd was about 30 feet away, and completely ignored it. The theory behind that is that he/she is completely helpless for the first few days. If the herd were to pay it lots of attention before he/she can get up and move around, then they would attract predator's attention.


Don't worry, though. Somebody was keeping any eye on us.

This is what he/she will look like when he/she grows up.



This ostrich did a shimka dance for us, and blocked our way out of the enclosure.
She eventually lay down and refused to budge until a keeper came and pushed her out of the way.

Ostriches seem to be the trouble makers at the park. I heard the guides/drivers/keepers warning each other about them a few times.

Four baby giraffe's, all in a row:
Two of the babies curled up so that they rested their head's on their backs to sleep.


This is apparently very rare to see, because mature giraffe's only sleep about 20 minutes per day.


And on that note, I've gone about half way through the WAP tour. I'll finish it up later.