Cincy Critters

A few weeks ago I was in Cincinnati, and as I often do when I have some time to kill in a city, I went to the zoo.  It's always interesting to check out the critters, and each zoo seems to have a different specialty.  In Cincinnati they have a lot of rare species, and a lot of animals from Madagascar in particular.  This is an old lion that used to work with Sigfried and Roy in Las Vegas.  He's now retired, taking his leisure in a spacious compound, fed daily by zoo staff, as was being done here. 

A Mexican coastal rattlesnake, looking ready for action.

Lemurs from Madagascar, especially well groomed and carrying on with a certain aplomb!

The polar bear was dealing with fairly warm, humid weather, thus he was staying close to the water.

A rainbow lorikeet from Australia,  In the mountains and forests on the east coast of Oz, these guys are common.  You get a blaze of brilliant color when a group of them takes wing.

A Sumatran rhino.  There are only a few hundred of these critters left.  The Cincy zoo successfully bred a female...probably this rhino here...and she had a calf a few years ago.

This is a memorial to Martha, the last passenger pigeon in existence, who lived out her days at the zoo here, dying in 1914.  The remarkable thing is that in the mid 1800s, there were literally billions of these birds in the eastern and midwestern US.  They flew in flocks that darkened the skies.  Then, in the last half of the 19th century, they were killed en masse, with nets and guns, as food for slaves (before 1865) and the poor.  Between 1870 and 1890 their numbers crashed, and finally Martha was the only one left.