In a normal summer here in the East, certain activities are to be avoided due to the debilitating heat and humidity. These include strenuous exercise, being outdoors in the middle of the day, getting up and going to work, remembering your name, etc.
But this summer has been much more comfortable than usual. Some friends therefore suggested we visit the zoo with them and their children, which is to be avoided on hot days, so we headed there on...what turned out to be the hottest day of the summer.
Basically, the people at the visitor's center told us, we should go see all the animals right away, because the animals are smart, and by 11:30 they would be comfortably holed up in their air-conditioned areas, whereas we would be left looking at empty enclosures and panting from the heat.
This sounded like a good plan to us. The air-conditioned part, I mean. Thus we spent 52 minutes closely studying the endangered Panamanian frog, which is a whopping 1.3 inches long and is capable of sitting still with no movement whatsoever for long periods of time (in our experience, at least 52 minutes), but which was nevertheless extremely interesting because it was in a section of the Amazonian building that had air conditioning.
Air conditioning, you might know from your knowledge of climates, is not typical of Amazonian weather in the wild. There the temperatures usually hover around 963 degrees and the humidity is like having it rain inside your sauna, only worse. And indeed, this atmosphere is re-created in most of the Amazonian building at the zoo, which keeps the animals happy but makes visitors a little testy. In recognition of this, the building designers put in a door off the main entrance that bypasses the entire steamy part of the exhibit, a fact that we regrettably did not discover until we had been in the steamy section so long we feared that, like the Panamanian frog, we would be next on the endangered list.
Scientists are studying why the Panamanian frog is disappearing at alarming rates in the wild, but it doesn't take a great brain to guess the reason. We can use these simple facts to discern the cause:
1. The frogs are disappearing from the Amazon, which as we have discussed is way hot.
2. They thrive when placed in the zoo's complimentary air-conditioned tanks.
Ergo, the frogs have been leaving the 963-degree weather in vast numbers (according to rumors, on chartered AirPanama flights) and heading for various zoos with air conditioning.
Now that that mystery is solved, we can start putting all the money currently going toward this issue into air-conditioning the rest of the zoo, including the entire outside.
Eventually we ran out of air-conditioned environments and were forced to stand outside to see some of the animals. A splendid male lion was sprawled among the rocks, probably pondering which of the visitors looked the most weakened from the sun and would be easy pickings. But of course we weren't too worried, because male lions do not kill prey themselves. They depend on the womenfolk to do it for them*, and Mrs. Lion was, as any other wise female would be on such a sultry day, no doubt at a spa getting her nails done.
There was some dissension among us at the bear exhibit as to whether there was an actual bear in it. The discussion went something like this:
"There's a bear, right there!" [The rest of us squint at what appears to be a shadow in a cave-like opening.]
"No, it's just a shadow."
"No, it's a bear!"
This went on, with minor variations, for some time, until we really didn't care whether the shadow was a bear or a shadow or even an endangered Panamanian frog. But if the frog knew what was good for it, it would stay in the air conditioning.
________
*I will not, although it is tempting, generalize these facts to any other species that include a male.
No comments:
Post a Comment