Yesterday, Sunday, at 7:30 in the morning, my phone rang. Repeatedly. Enough to wake me up. I dragged myself out of bed and staggered over to the phone. The caller-ID displayed the names of my best friends.
“Oh no,” I thought. “Suzi’s in the hospital again. They wouldn’t be calling me at this time of day for something good…”
But they were. It was nothing to do with Suzi. Instead, it was an invitation to the zoo! “Get up! Get on the subway and we’ll pick you up in Scarborough!” The zoo is in northeastern Scarborough, almost in the country, and completely on the far side of the city from me.
“But the subway doesn’t start running until nine!” “Okay, we’ll come and get you.”
So they did, at it was off to the zoo for me, for the first time in years, maybe decades. When we for there, it was a beautiful quiet spacious late-winter day, with cleared lanes through a light snow in the parking lot. We parked and went to the entrance, where I bought a membership. A single adult ticket is $20, but a year’s membership is only $65. I’m going back.
I’d been restless, wanting a change of scenery, wanting to go somewhere warm and exotic. Little did I realize that I didn’t have to leave the city to do it!
We walked to the Australasian pavilion and pushed the door open. Immediately my glasses fogged up. Inside it was warm and humid, with the smell of living soil and the cries of strange birds. Around a corner was the first exhibit. Two largish long-tailed creatures squatted in branches, munching on leaves. They were tree kangaroos.
Wait a minute. Tree kangaroos? They have kangaroos that live in trees? That’s absurd, like fish that live underground. But there they were. Tree kangaroos.
We went through a door marked “Please keep this door closed so that free-flying birds do not escape.” Inside was lush vegetation and, yes, birds. Every now and then a black-and-white bird would give a melodious call. I believe it was a magpie. There were ducks paddling in the billabong, and a little sign explaining what a billabong is. (We would call it an “oxbow lake”.) There were flowers. There was rich soil. There were all sorts of plants, many towering high overhead. It was such a relief to be inside in the green, after so many months of winter–for just outside, through the condensation-covered glass, was the ice and snow of a Canadian winter.
We passed through this room into the next, which was drier and brighter. At the center was a sandy enclosure, and in the enclosure were two Komodo dragons. One was on top of the other. They were mating. It seemed a rather lazy procedure for such dangerous beasts: they just laid there, and moved a limb occasionally. Not like the turtles we saw later, which were downright frisky.
Nearby was an enclosure that simulated the savannah. The walls were painted to show a landscape extending to the horizon. In this enclosure was a brown kangaroo, and another animal that was curled up and fast asleep. There were also termite mounds (simulated, I think.)
The next room was the Great Barrier Reef exhibit: tanks of startling sea life. Fish in stripes and neon colours. (Yes, the fish in “Finding Nemo” weren’t that far off real life, at least in colour.) Coral reefs with anemones waving in the underwater breezes. And then there were the moon jellies, pulsating in pale ethereal beauty. It was hard to remember that they were carnivores. The guide mentioned that they ‘like shrimp’.
So I guess I got to go to Australia after all. Courtesy of the Toronto Zoo. 
More to follow, including pics, tigers and frisky turtles.
