A Day of Animal (and People) Watching at L.A. Zoo

It was Media Day at the Los Angeles Zoo. I took my three youngest grandchildren, their parents, my oldest granddaughter and my wife. Party of eight.

The day was warm, sunny and clear, after the rains. A docent, chic in her tan safari suit, led us up to the koala house. We filed in through a back door and saw a large koala at leisure. His gray-brown coat was thick and cuddly, his ears were large and shaggy. He was chewing eucalyptus leaves.

“You don’t call them koala bears,” I said to the docent.

“They are not bears,” she said evenly.

“Teddy bears aren’t bears either,” I said.

She eyed me steadily. “You’re kidding me.”

I wasn’t sure. There might have been some sense in what I said.

We passed an enclosure of animals that looked like goats. “They’re probably not goats,” I said, knowing how profligate nature was with species.

“They smell like goats,” my wife said.

“When did you ever smell a goat?” I asked her.

We passed dozens of exotic plants and trees. Their scent was in the air. Japanese pagoda trees. Camphor trees. Hong Kong orchid trees.

An Indian rhino lay beside a huge rounded rock. Hard to tell the rhino from the rock. A sign said he could weigh 30 tons and run 30 miles an hour.

Two tigers were enclosed behind a moat. One reclined, the other walked back and forth, exactly like a house cat.

“They really look majestic,” my daughter-in-law said. I was glad house cats weren’t that big.

“I want to see the oryxes,” I told my son. He had the map. He said the oryxes were in North America. That seemed odd, since oryxes are Arabian. I wanted to see if they really looked like unicorns when they stood sideways to you, so that their two horns looked like one.

We passed a sloth bear. A big black woolly bear. He was asleep but the sign said he could be extremely dangerous when surprised.

An orangutan was crouched on a ledge above his moat. His hand was in a fist on the rock and his chin was pressed against it. His mournful eyes examined us steadily. He looked like Rodin’s “The Thinker.” He probably thought we were foolish, or silly, or incomprehensible. In the moat an infant was drinking water cupped in his hands and splashing it over his head. Like a child at play.

An African elephant stood silhouetted against the sky like an elephant in the movies. Three giraffes stood together, nibbling at shoots. I think the giraffe, with its graceful neck and legs and its compact body, is the most elegant of animals.

The chimpanzees were putting on a show. One had got hold of a soft-drink cup. He broke it open. He flattened it and held it over his eyes and turned this way and that, dramatizing his blindness. He put it under him and spun around on it.

I didn’t care about seeing the reptiles, but we had to file through the house. I have never understood why the creator, whoever or whatever it was, had to bring snakes into being. Of course if it wasn’t for the first snake, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy sin.

Two camels stood side by side, looking utterly ridiculous. I don’t know which is sillier--the camel or the kangaroo. Like every other animal in the zoo, they demonstrate the incredible versatility of life on Earth.

We finally came to the oryxes. There was a small herd of them. A sign said, “It is believed the oryx was the basis of the mythical unicorn.” I could not see how the oryx could be mistaken for a unicorn. It is too stocky, for one thing. The unicorn is more graceful. Also, its horns are too long and too curved. The unicorn’s horn is straight. The myth is, I suspect, that the oryx was ever mistaken for a unicorn.

As we headed for the exit we passed two wart hogs. This thoroughly disgusting creature is proof again of nature’s diversity and its lack of moral and aesthetic considerations.

As if to underline the point, the last creatures we saw were the flamingos. Surely they are among the most beautiful of nature’s inventions with their pink, white and orange feathers, their graceful necks and pipestem legs and their ruffled behinds. Perhaps the price for all that beauty is stupidity. They hopped this way and that, en masse, quacking mindlessly like ducks.

It was a lovely day. But it made me sad to think that so many of these wonderful beasts are vanishing from the Earth.