This is a fluffy looking Lemur sleeping on top of a fence.
I’ve been bad this summer and haven’t posted a thing. Haven’t recorded and posted but one song to YouTube, as well. This week is different. I posted a song the other day, and now there’s this. What has this to do with France? It’s in France, in fact, not very far from where we live. And it was fun to visit and see all the primates in the closest thing you’ll find to their natural environment in France. Except the humans, who were in their natural state of confusion. If you look up the word singe, you’ll see it translated as monkey or ape, and you might as well just say primate because this place includes lemurs, who are neither monkey nor ape, but something like a lemur was probably an ancestor of both. I’d like to point out some cultural differences between France and the U.S. at this time.
But I can’t, because a zoo is a zoo in either country. Is it bad to keep what may have been wild animals in captivity, however nice it is? Consider that this zoo contains, according to their signage, the largest group of bonobos in the world. Group, not total numbers. Still, there aren’t that many bonobos here. I hope that some day zoos will be able to repopulate the wild with otherwise extinct animals, which is why I enjoy zoos where I can get to know more about them. I was a biology major, in case you were wondering. Let’s hear it for the Krebs Cycle! (You’re using it, trust me on that.) There’s my intro, and here are some pictures of what we saw.
These are colobus monkeys (colobi to the French). When I was not yet in kindergarten, and aunt and uncle were stationed in Ethiopia, where they even met the Ras Ta, and where they also bought me a rug made from one of these monkeys. I was maybe five, I wore the thing out. I would never kill anything to make a rug these days, and in my defense, I didn’t kill that one. The hair was coarse, in case you were wondering.
They called these things Gélada. They look kind of like something I’ve seen before, but when I check a translation of that word, it comes up Gelada. Whatever that means, huh? A sign said they were a new species, but I don’t know if that’s new to this zoo, or actually a recent discovery. Some biologist I am!
This guy.
This gorilla was overseeing his group at feeding time. I would not mess with him ever.
His people. Yeah.
Near the end we saw chimpanzee feeding time. This one, for reasons only he (she?) knows, decided to climb a tree and face the other way.
That’s it. No profound insights, no comparing France and America, just some pictures of primates doing what they do. We did listen to the chimp feeder’s spiel, but only really caught the topic sentences. It takes a couple of seconds for me to get what I’ve heard, and there’s no time when someone is giving a spiel, but she didn’t look or act differently from any other zoo employee taking care of animals. The chimps seemed to appreciate her as well.
Next time I’ll write about things I think France does well. Watch this space for details.
