Wild Animals
I am surrounded by wild animals. First among them are Charlotte and Evelyn. Those are my two granddaughters, who are spending the week with us here on the hilltop. They are reasonably well-mannered wild animals, but wild animals nonetheless. What makes them wild is that they are visceral, unpredictable and do not follow any particular convention with which I am familiar. They don’t bite or present any particular danger to me, but neither do most wild animals I encounter these days. To begin with, they have eating patterns that are both very different between the two of them and yet equally child-like. Charlotte has always been a meat-eater. For example, yesterday at the Safari Park, she had a hot dog for lunch, but chose to eat it without the bun and with just mustard on it, like the good New Yorker (specifically Brooklynite) that she is. It is somewhat unusual for a little girl, but she just likes meat and always has for her nine years. As much as Charlotte is no vegetarian, Evelyn is a very particular muffin-eater. She has a sweet tooth but is quite particular about what sweets she will eat. As an example, she finds Reece’s Pieces too “heavy” on her tummy. At lunch she turned her nose up at the chicken strips and spent her lunch munching on Cheetos until her fingers turned orange.
Both girls love the water and while I have no pool out here, they are used to spending hour upon hour in the pool in Ithaca and found the hot tub (appropriately reduced to 90 degrees) a reasonable enough facsimile to warrant splashing around in for an hour a day. When they are not swimming, these two wild creatures are running around and doing one arts and crafts project after another. This is not so much learned behavior as innate by my reckoning. Their mother is an arts and crafts princess, their maternal grandmother is an arts and crafts queen and their now-deceased great-grandmother was the queen mother of all arts and crafts. These are two daughters of a daughter of a two-daughter family, who was an only child daughter. I have known four maternal ancestors of these two wild animals and they are decidedly part of a matriarchal clan where boys and men are a necessary evil, but not in any way the mainstay of life. Charlotte is a bit of a daddy’s girl, but I figure she will eventually grow out of that. Evelyn seems to cleve a bit to Gramps, but I am certain that both will move on to their matriarchal center as they age.
As appropriate for this theme, yesterday was our day to go to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park that used to be called the Wild Animal Park. The facility, some twenty-five miles north of the Zoo itself, began life as a breeding facility, but has now grown into a full-blown attraction all its own. It is set on 1,800 acres of which 800 are intended to remain as wild as the day they were born. The rest is set out in a replication of the various continents of the world with the continent-appropriate species of animal inhabiting them. The habitats are intended to be as close a replication of their natural habitat as possible in this high chaparral north of San Diego. Our schedule for this visit is planned to include a wild butterfly tour and a behind-the-scenes wild Australian Outback tour. The butterfly apiary is climate controlled and humid in a tropical way. There are thirty or forty species of butterflies that are bred from imported South American larvae and one is more colorful than the next. We are instructed to not touch the butterflies, which are, as you would expect, quite delicate. We are each given a nectar-filled tube with a fake and colorful flower designed to attract butterflies. In this way we will be feeding the butterflies, who are generally not afraid of humans or probably anything. There is an interesting lesson in that. If you are cute and flighty enough, perhaps you have nothing to fear in life. Then we learn that at the end of their three-week cycle they are exposed to the adjoining bird aviary, who I guess see butterflies as the same thing as Evelyn sees in Cheetos, except with more colorful powder to get all over their beaks. The exit from the apiary is interesting in that it requires a three times review by park personnel to determine if you are spiriting out any stay butterflies, who are probably seeking a way around the aviary.
Our next stop is at the Australian Outback tour where we have a private 90 minute tour of the wild animal breeding operation from the back-of-house perspective. We go to visit tree kangaroos in their secret hiding place, wallabies and kangaroos with their joeys (both in and out of pouch) and a platypus farm. It seems there is only one place outside Australia where platypuses are maintained in captivity and we are there to see how that is done. The most notable part of the platypus operation is the holding tanks for the dozens of crayfish which are kept in bubbling aquariums, keeping them fresh for the slaughter for the two hungry platypuses. It does give one pause that the rare and prized platypus is given access to well-maintained crayfish, who are grist for the platypus mill. I guess like the food chain over in the butterfly farm, we are all just waiting for the abattoir, so there is little pity for the oblivious crayfish.
After the Australian Outback tour we are ready for feeding time at the zoo for ourselves. It has been explained to us that it costs the Safari Park about $150,000 per month to feed all the animals. That translates down to about $200 per hour in food costs. It seems only appropriate that a lunch that would otherwise cost about $30 in the real world would cost about $150 here in the Park. That means that we fed the animals for about 45 minutes, not including the cost of the Park entrance fees and tour costs. We have one more contribution to make and that is to the large yellow hot air balloon that is tethered and rises several hundred feet with paying passengers who want to get a bird’s eye view of the Park and its surroundings. We take the bait and contribute another half hour to animal feeding program at the Safari Park. By this time, I am done in and it is time for this wild animal to go home and rest.
Back at home we encounter our own wild animal, Betty who has managed to sleep away her day without a care about where we were or where her feeding schedule would take her. As I sit in the hot tub amidst the wild animal granddaughter splashing, I get a call from a neighbor who has spotted a massive six-foot rattlesnake on our front yard near the road. What a treat to know that out here on the chaparral there will never be any shortage of wild animals to keep us company even without the visit of granddaughters or trips to the Safari Park.