San Diego Zoo - Behind the Scenes Tour

This month I missed my photo club's outing to Seaworld because I had an opportunity to get a "behind the scenes" tour at the San Diego Zoo. I can always go to Seaworld, but I've never had the opportunity for a behind the scenes tour of the zoo before, so my choice was clear.

Of course, with camera in hand and lots of spare compact flash chips and a couple spare batteries, we hit the zoo early – before they even opened. We got our own personal tour guide who drove us around in our own personal bus and we got to go where few others (except keepers and those that pay the bucks for the same opportunity) go.

Right off the bat, we had a problem. When you order a “behind the scenes” tour you get to pick your 3 animals you want to get up close and personal to – and the gorillas weren’t on our list. We had heard that all you do is go up on the roof and look down on them. Perhaps a better view that others may get, but it wasn’t that special. We’ll, that’s where our guide took us. Yes, we got a good view and we got a talk from the gorilla keeper himself (very cool), but that wasn’t supposed to be in our package. A little discussion with our tour organizer and the tour guide – and a call back to ‘headquarters” resulted in us getting this as a bonus animal.

We went “backstage” with the tigers and got a talk from the tiger keeper too. We went backstage of the Koalas – not that special. You cannot get any kind of view really – worse than you get if you go in the ‘public’ way and there was no koality interaction either. If you do the tour, I would recommend staying away from this choice.

Another on the list was the Hippos. We got to watch our tour guide feed the hippos some watermelon (it looked good, too) and get the hippo to open its mouth, etc, but it was all through very heavy bars (hippos are strong after all). While coming out of the backstage area of the hippos though, we got called over by another keeper – it seems a new okapi had just been born a couple days before and it was with its mother, feeding. We got to peek through the bars and see it – it was cute. Aren’t all babies?

So with tigers, hippos, and koalas done – I guess we had time left or our tour guide was feeling generous ‘cause we got to go see the camels and feed them backstage. Well, we got to feed ONE of the camels anyway. Up until this point, I didn’t know camels were such slobbery animals – but now I’m in the know.

Also we stopped by the pandas, but the line was long, so we got to go backstage there too and watch the daddy panda (Gow gow?) eat bamboo for about 15 minutes.

So, for our 3 animal tour, we got 7 – pandas, gorillas, hippos, koalas, okapis, camels, and of course, tigers. Included in the backstage package was lunch at one of three restaurants at the zoo. A pretty good meal can be had there.

Afterward, most of our group left for home (lots of old people), but Bev and I stayed for a while longer to check out some of the other animals. We made the trip up to see the Polar bears, which are usually entertaining, but they were more into napping this afternoon. A trip down to the hippos yielded pretty much the same results – one sleepy hippo. At least a trip to the Sichuan Takins was interesting. I love these guys. They look so happy for some reason. They kind of have “cow smiles” all the time.

Check out the pix by clicking the title at the top. It was a great day at the zoo.