The San Diego Zoo

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At the zoo, there were baby warthogs
			and baby ducks!

We also saw very large African animals:

An elephant,

a giraffe (who, at birth, has a six foot fall to the ground!)

and these exotic zebras.

Then, there were bears: The brown bear, looking like a patient diner waiting to order his lunch;

the sun bear, gnawing on a bone;

and, of course, the panda bear:

(Her baby was sleeping in the branches of the nearby tree, but we didn't get a good picture of him !)

There were also smaller animals with cute, expressive faces: The charms of this meer cat are obvious,

and these guys, when not grooming each other, were swinging from branch to branch (and sometimes missing), and finding and eating treats hidden in their enclosure.

Wild Animal Park

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We got very close to some natives of California:
The bighorn sheep

(and one of his ancestors)

and the California condor.

In the enclosures we saw from the train tour, the ox lay down with the gazelle,

and there was plenty of room for the rhinos

and elephants.

The people who went on a truck tour through the animals' habitat could feed the giraffes,

and maybe see one of these "burping" deer up close.

The beautiful Arabian Oryx have been extinct in the wild for several decades, although efforts are being made to reintroduce them to their native habitats in the deserts of the middle east. It's easy to see why the myth of the unicorn may have originated with this animal (they have two horns, but from the side, as seen here, it looks a lot like one.)

These brightly colored lorikeets would come down from the trees
to perch on the hands of people offering them nectar.

Owen posed with one of the gorillas living in the park:

Some of the gorillas hung back, but others kept climbing down into the moat that separated them from the humans.