The Ostriches and the Bees

The Woodland Park Zoo is a cute little zoo, tucked away in the middle of the city, with pretty habitats and a laid back vibe. It's a great place to take kids, and in an effort to get these kids to pester their parents into becoming zoo members, they're always trying to market the crap out of their newest cuddly exhibit. A few months back it was the Humboldt penguins, but now that they're dying from avian malaria, the zoo marketing department has quickly pushed those stuffed animals off the shelves in favor of the next big things...

Which are the new snow leopard cubs, as seen above. In addition to photo op cut-outs, they've stocked the gift shops with little leopards and they even had Apple name their new operating system in their honor. These people have no shame.

Since we're zoo members (marketing works!), we shot out on Saturday to spend a rare rainy summer morning waiting with everyone else at the zoo for the little balls of fur to come out of hiding. It turns out that a snow leopard looks like a regular leopard except white with a big squirrel tail. Very cute, but no word on performance or backward compatibility for OS 10.5 apps.

Sorry, should have thrown up a nerd alert before that last one. Won't happen again.

Anyhoo, though we went for the Snow Leopard cubs, Finn got lucky with a biology lesson thrown in for free. Courtesy of the ostriches. I have a movie, but it's really not blog-friendly, so you'll have to settle for this still photo.


They were doing this right in front of a huge pile of ostrich eggs, which leads me to believe that this bird is the Jim Bob Duggar of the animal kingdom. Luckily, Finn's still too young to ask questions, so I didn't have to make up any stories about how the Daddy ostrich is just cleaning the Mommy ostrich's back, which is nice.

After that exhibit, there was really nothing else to see so Finn spent the remainder of the day jumping in every mud puddle in the zoo. Which probably didn't help his cold. Which potentially hastened the arrival of another ear infection. Which has now led to our doctor recommending a consult with an ENT regarding tubes for his ears.

I blame the snow leopards. Stupid zoo marketing department.