Also we saw a Mousedeer, which was worth it just for the name.
I was a bit shaken by the figure given by the keeper for lions left in the wild though - down to about 20,000, from 32,000 just four years ago. :-/ When I was a child, I remember seeing figures for endangered species, and thinking my generation would be the one to do something about it. Yeah. That didn't happen.
Anyway, they had lions, but let's face it, the Carpathian Lynx is prettier than lions.
I have nothing to say about this meerkat, except it was *really* keen to be photographed so I promised it I would put the photo on here.
The humbolt penguins, however, had a great deal to say for themselves, a woeful cry like a donkey discovering it had been forsaken by its Donkey God.
This bird was strutting along the top of a species label, looking extremely concerned that there was no entry for itself on the board.
We later found a label for it and discovered it is a Cinnamon Ground Dove.
Pp attempted to impersonate a Disney Princess, and got pecked. :-D
These are Asian otters, which are much smaller cuter and more social than the British kind, and they had a lovely enclosure with a stream running through it. I was a bit worried about that otter bottom left, who was wandering around with a huge pebble in its mouth. I wondered if it had got stuck, since it spent so long holding it! But then it took the rock out, adjusted it a bit, and then put it back in its mouth. So clearly it *could* remove it. It just liked having a pebble in its mouth.
The otters were so cute I took a number of pointless photos of them, of which this is one of the best.
Here are some Macaques, looking longingly out at the car park and wondering where they had left their car keys.
... and then the zoo closed, so we went away in search of chips, and ended up on a cliff...
Where it began to rain, so we sat in the car looking out at the sea in the rain and eating fish and chips, which felt enormously British of us.
In other news, I saw our neighbour out driving his MX5, so presumably the baling-out operation was successful, although he did say he was only driving it because his landrover engine has died.
