View allAll Photos Tagged zoo
Squirrels are members of the family Sciuridae, consisting of small or medium-size rodents. The family includes tree squirrels, ground squirrels, chipmunks, marmots, flying squirrels, and prairie dogs.
We took a long weekend and went to Pittsburgh for our short vacation. The zoo is pretty nice, but you always seem to be going up hill. Anyway it is always good to get away at least for a little while.
Saw these in Wildlands zoo in Emmen. The male started impressing the female by bowing and cooing. They are quite large birds!
Sunday at the Zoo with the Melbourne Camera Club. Nice weather, there were a lot more people than animals.
With their pink and crimson plumage, long legs and necks, and strongly hooked bills, flamingos cannot be mistaken for any other type of bird. These beauties have long fascinated people. An accurate cave painting of a flamingo, found in the south of Spain, dates back to 5,000 B.C.
The flamingo’s pink or reddish color comes from the rich sources of carotenoid pigments in the algae and small crustaceans the birds eat. Caribbean flamingos, a subspecies of greater flamingo, are the brightest, showing their true colors of red, pink, or orange on their legs, bills, and faces.
Flamingos live in lagoons or large, shallow lakes. These bodies of water may be quite salty or caustic, too much so for most other animals. In some lakes, their only animal “neighbors” are algae, diatoms, and small crustaceans. That works in the flamingo’s favor, as the birds dine on these small creatures!
Chilean, Andean, and puna flamingos are found in South America; greater and lesser flamingos live in Africa, with greaters also found in the Middle East; the Caribbean subspecies is native to Mexico, the Caribbean, and the northernmost tip of South America.
-San Diego Zoo