Words cannot even express how today went. Tyler and I had the most amazing experience at the zoo. Ryan has a customer who works at the zoo and we were able to go behind the scenes with his wife. Tyler wants to be a Zoologist so this was all about her today. We toured different parts of the zoo with Sheena, she is a vet tech and works with ALL the animals. We started at the clinic where we were able to interact with a baby red panda, 100 year old tortoises, a screaming hairy armadillo, and a grey wallaby. The baby red panda is about 3 months old and just the cutest damn thing. He was running around, showing off, trying to climb up Tyler's pant leg. We found that his species is severely endangered. The tortoises were HUGE. They scared the crap out of me. The one tried to make a break for it when Sheena opened the pen. He's 400 pounds, once he's out there isn't much you can do to get him back in. That was funny.
We then went over to the fennec foxes. Tyler has been in love with foxes for as long as I have known her. I thought she was gonna burst when she saw them. The two we saw are used in educational shows so we also saw a bunch of birds and a two toes sloth. We got to feed the sloth and she was super cool. So chill, and laid back, just hangin out. We got to feed the sloth which again was COOL.
The best part was the Rhino's. Once we got the rules of being up close with these LARGE animals we were able to pet them and Tyler hand fed them. They were so gentle and just wanted to be rubbed. The 'sisters' were very friendly. They stuck their heads up against the bars and we were able to rub their cheeks and around their nose, horns. Their faces are much smoother than I expected.
Just a wonderful day and I am so glad I got to spend it with Tyler. I wish we could go back and see the other animals.
