I've settled on Animal Kingdom as my favourite park. It has two awesome shows (Festival of the Lion King and Finding Nemo: The Musical), a cool rollercoaster (Expedition Everest), and I have to admit I'm a closet fan of Dinosaur. Plus it has animals! Who couldn't love it? And I'm a sucker for Disney theming and I think they've got it pretty much perfect in Animal Kingdom.
Honestly, what I mostly want to do in this post is put up photos of animals and coo over how cute they are. So. This is a giraffe.
Some rhinos:
I'm not sure what this guy is (some kind of antelope, I guess), but we got an awfully good look at him because our safari truck stopped near him for about ten minutes.
Why did the truck stop for so long? Apparently because a few trucks in front of us, this guy was standing in the middle of the road.
My favourite animal is the meerkat, exemplified by this little guy, looking cute for the camera:
His friends are keeping watch:
But what are they all looking at? Oh... these...
When I saw that there were vultures and meerkats in the same enclosure, I was a bit concerned. In hindsight, it should have occurred to me that vultures are only interested in meerkats that are already dead. But still... those birds are an awful lot bigger than the meerkats. I just had to assume that Disney knew what they were doing.
The meerkats were keeping a close eye on the vultures. And the vultures were keeping a close eye on the meerkats. Then one of the vultures stepped a little bit closer, crossing some invisible line that the meerkats had drawn in their mind. As one, the meerkats dropped to all fours and charged at the birds, screeching. The vultures fled. Meerkats 1, Vultures 0. I needn't have worried.
My most magical moment we had at Animal Kingdom though, was on our last day at the World, when we went to check out Rafiki's Planet Watch. We discovered that the previous night there had been a scuffle among the gorillas and the 4-month-old baby gorilla, Lilly, had been bitten on the arm. An x-ray showed that her arm was broken.
The vets called in some doctors from Celebration Hospital to help out, because operating on a baby gorilla is much more like operating on a baby human than, say, a lion.
We had a plane to catch, so we couldn't stay for the whole thing, but we did get to see Lilly being prepped for surgery.
Lilly greets her fans before her operation:
And the procedure begins:
We never got to find out how it all turned out but I hope that the operation went well and I assume since I haven't heard otherwise that Lilly is back with her family in the gorilla exhibit.
No comments:
Post a Comment