Metrozoo

I went to the excellent Miami Metrozoo earlier this week with my friends JR and Liz. It's a large zoo set in expansive grounds in what used to be a rural area. Now it's partially surrounded by suburbia but it's still a nice, interesting escape from the urban sprawl. We went on a weekday and there were few people there...it was quite peaceful. The parking lots are vast so I reckon it's not always so quiet. As might be expected, the zoo specializes in animals from warm environments such as Africa, South America, and southern Asia. Here are a couple tigers...including a white one...hanging out in their spacious enclosure, complete with a faux Indian temple. A nice touch. Blow up the pic to get a better view of the critters.

It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny but not too humid, with a pleasant breeze. As a result the animals were quite active. JR and Liz say that normally in Miami's heat they just hang out in secluded shady spots, but on this day they were cruising about nicely. You can hand feed the giraffes; here's one chompin' down on his tucker.

Like the vast majority of animals at Metrozoo, the giraffes have a large enclosure...several acres...surrounded by a moat, so they have plenty of room to roam.

The tortoises are low maintenance. They live in an enclosure with only about 3 foot high rock walls around it, which is sufficient to ensure they don't crawl off in super slo-mo. These guys can live 150 years but it must be pretty boring since they don't do much except crawl around...very sloooowly...and munch grass.

The zoo has red elephants, a result of them wallowing in dirt of the same color. You know, there's almost a touch of pink there...nah, I must've been drinking too much wine.

There are a lot of exotic animals at the zoo, but the most common critters are indigenous. White ibises abound! They hang out in many enclosures, and bludge for handouts from the tourons at the food courts. More impressive are the ubiquitous iguanas, which sun themselves all over the place. I saw one in the lions' enclosure that was fairly close to one cat, maybe 30 feet away. The lion eyed the lizard carefully but decided it wasn't worth the effort of lunging and trying to catch a tapa when her keepers fed her perfectly well. This handsome fellow is parked right in a main pedestrian walkway. People also ride rental carts here so I hope he didn't get squashed.