Zoo, early spring?

cattitude and I went to the Bronx Zoo today, for the first time in far too long. (First I was sick, and then it was winter.)

We started by walking through the seabird aviary, which was fun, and then the attached bird building, which has fine ibises and such, and where I realized that I mostly wanted to be outdoors. Fortunately, it was a warm enough day for that; unfortunately, a lot of the animals, including the snow leopards, seemed to think it was a fine day to lie down and nap.

Got lunch at the zoo cafeteria, which wasn't as good as usual; we're hoping this was just an off-season blip.

We went to the giraffe house for the aardvark exhibit; the zoo is trying to keep it dark, for the animals' sake, but it's curtained off, loosely, so my eyes would get dark-adjusted and then someone would come in or out, and I'd lose part of the dark adaptation. We saw the tail of one aardvark, sticking out of its den/artificial cave. The giraffes were good, though.

It's definitely getting on to bird courting season, both for at least some of the zoo birds and for wild/local birds. There was a flamingo displaying very impressively (and some others less so). Over near the duck ponds we saw several male red-winged blackbirds, singing and showing off their colored wings. (If there were any females around, they were hiding.) A muskrat was also lurking there, and we spent several minutes watching it and the birds; muskrats are usually a lot shyer.

We finished by spending a few minutes at Tiger Mountain, where we saw two fine tiger cubs (adolescent Amur tigers) and their mother. By then we were pretty tired, so we headed out, with only a quick look at the Pere David deer and the bison.

No crocuses yet, but witch hazel was blooming, and there are a lot of snowdrops.

We also saw chickadees and a wren, plus an assortment of ducks. One mallard in the flamingo pond near the cafeteria kept diving, not normal mallard behavior; it seemed as though he was trying to reach the bottom, classic mallard dabbling behavior, and not prepared to give up just because the water was too deep. So, dive, kick for the bottom, see if he could grab something before surfacing.

I am feeling pretty worn out, despite a restorative cup of tea.

( Also, I went to the gym yesterday )