July 06, 2002

Sarah with a lorikeet in her hair. It's fiddling with her hair band.

My dad wanted me to occupy my niece and nephew, Sarah and Sam, today while he took my sister and my brother-in-law to the airport. (They're heading to Washington DC for a few days.)

Since I had some free tickets to the aquarium, that's where we went. Egads, was it ever crowded. I knew it would be, but I didn't expect the wall to wall people that were there. It was impossible to get through the galleries, and we skipped most of the exhibits inside and headed outdoors.

I bought each of us a cup of nectar and we went into the lorikeet exhibit. There are 90 some odd birds in there, but 2/3rds of them were too hot to do anything and were sitting under bushes, relaxing in the shade. Fifteen wanted nothing to do with anybody, and the remaining few were hounded by people like paparazzi after movie stars. Each bird probably had five or six arms thrust towards them, holding out cups of nectar, and none of them were in the slightest hungry. They sat there and stared at people.

One of the birds attacking Sarah's bracelet.

I managed to get a few to sit on my hand and handed them off to Sarah. The birds loved her bracelet and would chew on it. (Shiny shiny!) Later, some birds discovered that she also had a shiny hair band, and so they would sit on her head and fiddle with that as well. These birds love shiny things, and are quite agile with their beaks and tongues - some of them can easily remove earrings. (Ah, an alternate source of income to the aquarium ;)

I later found a bird that was somewhat hungry. It sat on a branch while licking nectar out of the cup I was holding. (Their tongues are so cute!) Then, without warning, it turned its head and bit me on the ball of my thumb. Now birds have several degrees of biting. There's the friendly "kissy" bite, then the playful "nibble" bite, and then there's the "I'm warning you" bite, and lastly there's the "I'm going to make you bleed if it's the last thing I ever do" bite. For some reason, this bird decided it would put me in a great deal if pain and planted its beak right into my thumb. It did succeed in making me bleed. Profusely. And the bird lives to do it yet again. =P

Little bugger.

Sam the shark wrangler.

Anyway, we moved on to Shark Lagoon which was insanely crowded. Both Sarah and Sam managed to touch a few sharks and I just hung around and watched. Sarah stayed at the shark touch pool a bit, and also spent some time at the ray pool. Sam headed over to the little shark figure thingy and climbed around on it.

After that, we saw the sea lion presentation which was so crowded. I haven't seen one in awhile, and it wasn't as interesting as the ones I saw a year or so ago, but that might have just been today. They don't really do shows, but they have training sessions. Sometimes it's just working on husbandry behaviors, other times they work on more "stunt" type of things, like flips and such. The sessions are always varied to keep things interesting for the animals.

We walked through "my" gallery after that, and I got to see Leo swimming around in the Coral Reef exhibit. He looks so wonderful in there. =) But he always stays near the surface. After 30 some odd years of being in shallow water exhibits, I think he's a bit nervous to go deeper. I also snapped some pictures of the sea dragons, like any good tourist should.