Zoo Day.

A bright day with an exceedingly cold wind.

Before I left for the zoo this morning the man from Sky came round to fix our phone which hasn't been working for the last week. Peter had been in touch with Sky on his mobile and they kept saying the line was working but we still had no house phone which we get through Sky. It turns out that BT fitted the wrong socket so we have to wait for them to replace it. Also we seem to have the wrong sort of Sky hub which has now been replaced giving us a much better broadband speed.

Being sheltered from the wind at the zoo it was lovely and warm as I worked in a t-shirt though at times the wind howled eirily through the surrounding trees. Before I continue I need to make a correction to last week's zoo post. The two ex-pet monkeys are not Colobus monkeys (they're around the corner) but Cappuchin monkeys. Louie is 17 years old and Matthew is 33! I'm so glad they are able to be together, they groom each other , share food and co-operate to get food out of mazes. They have one puzzle maze where the food is put in at the top and they have to poke at the food with a stick to get it out at the bottom. Louie sits at the top doing the prodding and Matthew waits at the bottom for the food. This I learnt as another group of people were on a zoo tour. Cappuchin monkeys are popular as pets, they're small and very clever, but once they get to puberty at 5 they become unpredictable much like teenagers and it's then they are no longer used for film work or wanted as pets. 

This is the female wolf dog. She has some sort of swelling on her neck which needs regular draining.

My work today was much the same as last week. I started with a sweep around most of the paths and then settled down to weeding the same patch of gravel. Apart from Louie and Matthew banging a couple of hard plastic balls with food inside (dog toys I think) the sound-scape was more bird based. There was the gentle chuntering of a couple of hens, the occasional screech of a peacock and the twittering of finches in an aviary behind me. My one diversion was being asked to assist another regular volunteer to put a plaster on her finger which had a nasty bite from one of the woolly pigs which she'd been working with.

The meerkats are real crowd pleasers due to their inquisitive behaviour. They have a wooden structure in their enclosure, about 5 feet high and while I was sweeping there was a 'lookout' sitting right on the top. Naturally when I came by with my camera they were all down on the ground but they are easy to photograph as they come up and sit still.

When I got back home the first thing I had to do was to wash the car as it was covered with what looked like dozens of white finger prints. Our resident flock of sparrows must have had flash mob event on it, revenge for the sparrow Speedy killed perhaps? Then there was still time to sit outside, well wrapped up against the cold wind, to unpick yet another curtain to make the 'nets' for the second window in my study.