Not California (or: Columbus Zoo)

I had to attend a conference in Columbus, Ohio recently, so I stayed an extra day to see the Columbus zoo. My guidebook claimed that it has one of the best reptile collections in the U.S, and that's all I needed to hear. :) The conference banquet was held at the zoo a few days before my planned visit, and I began to worry that I'd made a mistake. The zoo is poorly laid out, and the map is atrocious, so the zoo seemed ordinary at first glance. But the zoo did live up to expectations! The reptile collection truly was outstanding, and I fell in love with an extremely active and photogenic Mexican Beaded Lizard. The Komodo dragon exhibit was the best I've seen (and I've seen many Komodo dragon exhibits :) with a huge 3-dimensional outdoor enclosure. I watched a beautiful dragon take a leisurely stroll tongue-flicking through the grass before climbing up a rocky ledge to bask in the sun. I felt as though I was watching a dragon in the wild! The animal enclosures were unusually spacious, and the zoo has an eclectic variety of animals (especially since it isn't all that big, though it isn't small), so the high proportion of exotic animals is what stands out.

The most special exhibit was a pair of manatees. Manatees are such utterly improbable animals. They look like they couldn't possibly survive in the wild (well, I guess they aren't doing a particularly good job of it, but only because of people). One of the manatees was rescued by Sea World personnel after a boat mangled her tail, and many surgeries were performed to save her. Manatees usually rely on their extraordinarily powerful tails to propel them through the water and they don't use their flippers much, but a zookeeper pointed out that if you watch the injured manatee you can see that she uses her flippers a lot more than her companion. When I asked if they are smart, the keeper said she didn't know but that she'd observed one adult manatee help nudge a reluctant baby manatee into the bigger tank with the adults. I also watched one manatee seemingly groom the other.

I struck up a conversation with the orangutan keeper as well. I'd heard that orangutans were extremely intelligent and legendary escape artists who had been known to pick locks. The keeper more than confirmed what I'd heard. She said that she regularly finds straw in the locks of their enclosure (!), and that in her opinion the orangutans are the smartest of all the apes. The other apes (e.g., chimps) are easily distracted (e.g., by a noise or something shiny). But not the orangutans -- when they work on a task, their attention stays focused and they will persist. They have incredible memories and will come back to things later. And they learn extremely fast -- can pick up a new word in just 2 days.

And you gotta love this story. The orangutans like to bring sticks into their indoor enclosure and hide them in their "loft". If the keepers leave anything outside the door of their cage, the orangutans will wait until the keeper has gone, use the stick to pull the item into their enclosure, and then stash it away in their loft. Their favorite items are garden hoses! When they want to have fun, they bring the stolen garden hose down from the loft and display it to a keeper. The annoyed zookeeper then painstakingly pulls the hose through the bars of the cage -- this takes a while because hoses are heavy and long! When the hose is just about out, at the very last minute the orangutan hooks a single (incredibly powerful) finger around the last segment of the hose and instantly yanks the whole thing back into its cage. You just know the orangutan is laughing its ass off at the stupid human!

Photos live here (warning: reptiles are disproportionately represented ;)