Tuesday, February 4, 2003
Busch Gardens today! Woo-hoo! Monika was waiting for this for four weeks, and we finally made it. In fact, Busch Gardens had changed only slightly in the intervening eight years and had all the nice features we remembered. Basically, it combines a zoo/nature preserve with a mild version of an amusement park, and we like this mix. They only have three large roller coasters, which is fewer than say, a 6 Flags park, but we are not roller coaster people so that is fine with us. On the other hand, they had an ice revue show, a song and dance show, a clown/acrobat show, a bird show, and a kiddie show, so we had things to look at between eating and looking at the animals.

But the main thing was looking at, and taking pictures of, all the animals. The Busch Gardens folks have worked hard to create appropriate habitat-like settings for each set of animals, which hopefully makes the animals feel better but certainly from my point of view makes for nice photographs. We saw things that impressed us for different reasons. In the tiger exhibit we saw a large tiger swim in the moat, shake itself like a dog, and attempt to climb a tree, and it was clear he could have rapidly climbed the tree if he really wanted to, like if “dinner” was sitting in the tree. In that area we also saw the unusual white-colored tigers, which were disarmingly pretty for a really ferocious predator.

The hippopotamus was impressive just to see such a large, massive body heave itself gracefully out of the water. I was also totally astounded at the number and variety of tropical fish they had living the hippo’s pool—I didn’t think that number of fish could actually live together in that space; it was like wall-to-wall fish and each one different.

There were two completely separate aviaries, each with different types of birds. In one you could buy nectar for the parakeets and feed the birds. The birds, however, would sometimes fly into a person’s hair in preference to sitting quietly on an arm. Depending on the person and what the bird was doing at the moment, this could cause a lot of different reactions. One woman had reddish hair that just seemed like catnip to a certain parakeet, and he kept flying back into it—she took it with good grace and just let him flutter around in it.

The primates, however, were impressive because they are so human-like. The children play around just like human children, teasing adults and trying to hide behind mommy when they are chased. I hadn’t realized that the great apes have several critical features that are identical to humans including opposable thumbs that allow for using tools, hair instead of fur, and fingernails that give a remarkably dexterous hand. One gorilla was sleeping and kind of scratched his side and then curled his hand up at his head, and I was fascinated by the fact that I often do exactly the same thing and that his hand looked exactly like a human hand. The more you think of these animals as human, the less right it seems to keep them in cages, and they really seem humanoid in all critical respects.

Click on the film reel to view a 15 second video.
If you can't view the video go to http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/ to download the free QuickTime viewer.

But the one big advantage of Busch Gardens is beer! We had a free sample at the Hospitality House where we found out there was going to be a “Beer School” later that day, so we signed up. The beer school was actually quite interesting altho it also had a lot of glorification of the Busch family in it. We found it interesting that they had successfully kept 5 generations of the family leading the company in the brewing business for over a 100 years. Descriptions of the brewing came complete with tasting of various beer products just like a wine tasting only ‘hoppier’. Anyway, we had a great time despite the clouds and occasional rain, returning home after 5 for a quick dinner.

During the night we had Raccoon Encounter II—this time they’re hungry! Monika had left the plastic bin with our breakfast food out with a box on it to weight the lid down. She thought that would be sufficient to prevent the predations of the nocturnal predators, but she was wrong. We heard some bumping and thumping in the middle of the night, and finally I heard the munching sounds of a happy raccoon and awakened Monika. When we investigated, we found that the box had been pushed to one side and outside was a now empty bag of bread. The raccoon had pulled up one end of the bin’s lid and fished out the bag of bread from underneath. The bread was old and stale and we had another loaf of fresh bread, so it wasn’t a great loss. But for the future we took all the food bins and locked them in the truck at night. Still, the raccoon had a midnight snack on us so we had to score it as Raccoons 2, Holts 0.