Friday, November 28, 2014

Singapore Zoo

The Singapore Zoo is one of the best zoos in the world, and one of my favorites. It was one of the reasons I wanted to stop in Singapore. With its "open concept", there are no bars or wire or glass on many of the enclosures so it's great for taking photographs. Some of the primates even roam "free" in certain areas. (Note: This post is out of sequence but it took me a while to go through the photos and then I had to wait till we had sufficient internet to upload them.)

We started our visit with "breakfast with the orangutans". It's a little hokey, but it was nice to see them up close. The orangutan exhibit (a big area) is across the path from the restaurant and a long tree trunk is lowered so they can cross over. They get breakfast too, which is their incentive, but it's voluntary for them - if they don't feel like hanging out with the tourists they don't have to. Here was one of them coming to visit.

orangutans

orangutans

And as a bonus you could also hold a python. Strangely, that was much less popular than the orangutans :-)

me with python

Untitled

Zoos and aquariums (at least the ones we visited this trip) seem to have gone overboard on wanting to take your picture and then sell it to you. At the orangutan breakfast they told us we would each get a chance to get up close to them, but what that actually meant is that you could line up to stand in front of them (with your back to them!) and get your picture taken. Bah!

Usually you don't get a good view of the lions or tigers so it was nice to see this white tiger out roaming (and cooling off) from quite close.

white tiger

These white-faced saki monkeys were roaming free and we couldn't spot them until they came down at feeding time.

white-faced saki monkey

The elephant show was also a little goofy, but fun to watch them "in action".

elephants
elephants
"stealing" carrots
For me and the kids near us, the other excitement during the elephant show was this quite large colorful (wild) skink going by just below the seats.

skink

These whistling ducks were at the end of the rainforest show. The funniest part was after the show when they were trying to herd them off the stage. Forget herding cats, the expression should be "herding ducks" :-)

whistling ducks

By lucky accident we arrived at the Giant Aldabra Tortoises just at feeding time and there weren't many people there so we paid to feed them. Tortoises are one of my favorite animals and I love the giant ones. They are normally so slow moving, but they were surprisingly keen to eat the chunks of carrot.

feeding Giant Aldabra Tortoise

giant tortoise

They even had a walk through reptile area, although it no longer had any snakes, and the main attraction was this lazy iguana sunning itself on the walkway. It didn't seem to mind people stepping over it.

iguana

We spent almost the whole day at the zoo and we still missed lots. I guess we'll just have to go back some day :-) And there's also the Night Safari and the River Safari and the Bird Park if you have time. (I went on the Night Safari on a previous visit and really enjoyed it.)

I didn't discover it till too late, but the zoo has a handy app. I used it afterwards to identify some of my photos.

See all 39 photos as a slideshow or overview

See also Shelley's Singapore post

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