calgary zoo- australia

i won't be covering the whole zoo. due to distracting circumstances (next post) i only visited and took photos of about half the zoo. though this saddens me a little, i at least had seen all the missed sections before.

however i do one more section of the zoo i have good photo coverage of. that is the australian house. though this is a misleading name. in addition to having many critters from down under proper, for whatever reason the calgary zoo has lumped in several animals from south america as well...

in good news this building hasn't changed much since i was a hatchling. including my favourite the kangaroo pit.

which of course has a number of kangaroos wandering around within it! red kangaroos to be precise, as there are quite a few different types to potentially choose from.

the kangaroos aren't alone down there though. their kept company by my favourite flightless bird, emus.

their cheeky fluff balls. they are constantly scouting the enclosure perimeter for shoe lace or toes to peck at. as again this outdoor enclosure is a pit, and thus we looking at the animals are high above them. putting your shoes at emu height. so when here watch out when they are close... :P

inside they have the reputed (but unconfirmed or deserving) "most dangerous modern bird", the crested cassowary. i think it is sad they have earned this reputation.

though they have a very sharp claw on their foot (much like a raptor dinosaur) that they do use for kicking threats, they don't seek out things to attack. more to the point the australian cassowary is the one under constant threat, and is on the brink of extinction...

i also liked this cute little blue tongued skink!

i'm embarrassed to say i took the photo of this guy, thinking how cool his pose was. however now coming to the blog post i can't for the life of me, remember what he (or she) was! i have trouble keeping mammals apart at times!

the little cavy was unbelievably cute, but hard to photograph... seriously out of the 10 photos i took of it this was the only one that turned out! at least i got it...

finishing off the whole building was the cool nighttime/nocturnal house, in which they simulate night conditions for a variety of animals that prefer the darker times. of course my camera wouldn't really work in here, so you'll just have to enjoy this attempt at an arty shot of a silhouetted frog.

calgary zoo- african rainforest

wrapping up the calgary zoo's african complex, we hit the transalta rain forest centre.

right away in the front entrance they have some cool reptile displays.

such as this rather fancy chameleon. i'd look as smug as him if my skin could change colour like his!

there was one case though, i couldn't spot anything at all in... oh well.

i favourite of the reptile greeters (who admittedly were further into the building) were my distant ancestors the crocodiles. these were west african dwarf crocodiles to be precise.

still kind of neat to think my kind came from something similar to one of those guys millions of year ago!

here's a better picture of them here.

moving right along was a very pretty tank of african river fish. this being a zoo's aquarium, had me totally onboard with this section of the zoo! if there is nothing i like more than an aquarium, i haven't found it yet!!!

next you enter an indoor aviary. sadly as it is indoors, it doesn't quite live up to melbourne zoo's or even the one in invercargill's botanic garden's aviary. though many of the birds here were cool...

i especially liked the african spoonbill. i have a weakness of spoonbills, which may not be my favourite type of cousin, they are still high on the list. i have to say this african genus looks a lot more dignified then their australasian cousins the royal spoonbill!

this building of the zoo also housed the gorillas... oh how i hate gorillas! (if you're wondering why just watch any [good] version of king kong, and you should be able to figure it out ;P)

even the cute little baby gorilla wasn't enough for me to pass this spot by quick...

the last thing i'm covering on the blog (as you really should just visit the zoo if you can) is the wild african hunting dogs. these guys are super cool, one of the only wild forms of dog in the world, and i've never seen them at a zoo before (mind you i haven't been to as many zoos as i'd have liked).

taste of nature #6

a new zealand striped skink or oligosoma striatum.

my old home

being back in my old hometown (drumheller) has given me time to dwell on old times and memories. nothing seems to stir them quite like the specific locations of my now gone life.



none more then this seemingly unassuming part of the royal tyrrell museum, the cretaceous garden. it is one of the most missed places in the whole building, partially caused by it being tucked in such an odd corner of the building, and the fact it was a greenhouse.

not that it is an ordinary greenhouse, mind you. every single plant kept in here is a close relative of plants that grew in alberta at the end of the cretaceous. in as many cases as the museum curators could manage, these plants are as close to the prehistoric form as could be found today. in some cases this means their only a bit like the extinct forms, but in a few crazy cool cases the plant have barely changed.

this however required acquiring plant species from very obscure locations around the planet (the less changed by evolution a plant, the better an indicator it comes from some where cut off like a tiny island or remote valley). in fact the tyrrell has been heavily working on cataloguing its collection, as it is one of the few in the world like it (which wasn't realized when it originally assembled in the 1980's).

why i have such a fond attachment to the place though, is that this used to be my home.

right after i first go my job at the tyrrell, i was mean to dan and craig, who had up till then been letting me live with them. dan in particular didn't take that well (though i know it hurt my legal guardian craig... he just never let it show), and so the two of them (who also worked at the tyrrell) arranged for me to become an in house specimen at the museum... aka they kicked me out of their house for being a rude roommate (i don't entirely blame them)!

so the museum decided to put me in here.

for better or worse this was my home for over 2 years. my job back then was a "visitor experience facilitator"... which was fancy talk for a dinosaur statue. that's right, my job was to stand around in here and pretend to be inanimate!!! apparently despite my "people friendly" personality, i was a deterrent to guests experiences, and so i wasn't supposed to bug the museum's visitors...

not that i ever stuck to that job description. i'd accidentally talk to people all the time, and my boss cam never told the big cheeses.

just like everything else, the cretaceous garden has changed a lot since i was here, and yet not at all...

the obvious changes are in the vegetation. so much of it has either grown or been outright cut back since i left. very little of the green is the same... though MOST of the trunks and stems are as i remember them (i did sleep in and amongst them after all).

yet so much of it is the same as when i lived here. like my chilling bench is still here. i used to slump down there after a days hard work greeting and talking to guests (or uh, i mean pretending to be a statue...).

i received a lovely reminder of times long gone from above. my visit corresponded with the cretaceous garden's misting. this is of course to keep the humidity up for these mostly tropical plants (the badlands are quite arid afterall).

back in the day this was my version of a shower. i used to pretend i was just like a human, and would sometimes ever use a scrub brush while this was going on... which is embarrassing to admit, as back then in my youth i didn't realize you need soup for that to work!

my walking about startled this little stray garter snake. it clearly had snuck in from outside as they often did (through cracks in the emergency exit doors), and it reminded me of all the other life i shared this place with when i lived here.

during my days not only were intruding snakes my roommates, but so were frogs, turtles, fire belly salamanders, gold fish, gar, and infiltrating sparrows. sadly i only saw this snake today (the turtles had long been removed due to health concerns of children handling them)

i walked by the garden's nursery. funny enough i lived here for 2 years straight, and yet i'd never gone in there once. seriously, not even as of today (or today) have i been in there

it was an off limits area to the public, and only the garden's manager was allowed in there. it always had this sort of sinister air about it (in that with my hyper sensitive t-rex nose i can really smell the bad chemicals used in there).

oh well there are always things about our old home that were there in plain sight that we never did, used, or saw. this is just mine.

i can't say i don't miss the old place. yet at the same time i'm not eager to move back in.

it is just nice to be able to visit my old home...

the local aquarium

well its official. i'm depressed...

sending lillian off has done in the fun of this trip to australia (for that whole story click this). now i just want to go home, but am stuck here for another couple of days.

i'd already wasted one of my key cheer up places here in melbourne trying to improve lillian's mood. the problem was now i needed a happiness pick me up. fortunately there was one place left. i'd kinda wanted to save it for another lillian date, but that wasn't going to be a problem now...

the melbourne aquarium. man do i love going to aquariums!

now the funny thing about this aquarium is it is basically just a bigger version of the last aquarium i was at, kelly tarlton's experience. as you'll see. which wasn't a bad thing. i really liked the auckland aquarium. as a bonus it had some extra things i'd never seen before (though it also didn't have penguins).

the first thing you see, was COOL AS! a cuttlefish. i'd never seen one before. ubber cool.

there was a real nice reef section, like in most aquariums... oooooh pretty

see!

hey i found nemo! (oh wait i've said this joke before)

i also snagged the best pic of a tigger fish i've ever pulled off (they're just so dared fast!).

a lion fish.

a real big primitive fish (didn't read the sign... silly me).

they had a real awesome jellyfish tank.

these crazy jellyfish that don't float. rather they just sit passively on the bottom catching their food.

they also had some neat spaceship looking "normal" jellyfish.

this HUGE fish tried to eat me through the glass.

a cute little lobster... er sorry, again as they call them here crayfish.

than there was this HUGE reef tank. full of all sorts of new reef critters i'd never seen before.

just like this big clam. i'd seen fossils of similar sized ones from the cretaceous (though they weren't the same shape).

this pretty pokey dotted ray.

speaking of pokey dots was a cool new shark, a leopard shark. neato.

a moray eel.

a sea snake! wow that was a very exciting first!!!

a monitor lizard. something i'd more expect in a zoo. if they had a mosasaur in here the lizard would have made some sense.

wow horseshoe crabs. its nice to run into another fellow living fossil.

hey now there is something i'm not surprised to see. a statue of a great white shark. seriously i need to start a business making these things. they're everywhere kelly tarlton's, the auckland museum, and te papa. i'd be stinking rich.

of course this was to let me know i'm entering the shark area.

just like at the auckland aquarium there were school sharks.

a dogfish.

some horn sharks, hadn't seen these before.

just like auckland aquarium there were underwater tunnels one could wander through and check out the locals.

emphasising the aucklandness of this aquarium was a bunch of sevengill sharks.

there were nurse sharks. i'd always wanted to see some.

well hanging out with the fish did cheer me up a bit.

a few more days and it was back off home to dunedin. for the first time in a really LONG time! funnily enough i wasn't going to be staying though.

my birthday present was a trip back home to canada. a place i also hadn't been to for an even LONGER period of time. yet i can't say i have a lot of questions about what that'll entail.