Week 6 - Zoo

By the end of Week 6 we went to Central Park Zoo. A bit of a detour from the Bronx Zoo, although personally better (especially for me, although quite necessarily?) due to me not needing to commute likely for good 2 hours minimum each. Instead, I settled for 1.5h each, I guess at some point travelling time becomes very relative. Back in Munich that was around 30 minutes by bike or by subway. In Warsaw that would have been around an hour. In Sydney about 2 hours. Distances change in the eyes of animals, though as some migrate for thousands of kilometers in search of food, established breeding areas, shelter from changing seasons. The Zoos seem to also vary in sizes, the one in Central Park was relatively small, compared to San Diego safaris, really tiny. If we consider New York a concrete jungle, well Central Park Zoo is really tiny tiny but even itself compared to Central Park itself which is a habitat for many animals, at the very least squirrels or national parks scattered across the globe, it's a microcosm compared to macrocosm.

It's something to think about.

So there's the thing. I haven't been to a Zoo for a while. How did the Zoo itself strike me as? How did it present itself in my eyes? In the course of the past years I have seen animals in a bit of a different spectrum, fed by the empathy flood of Dodo, which showcases all spectra of animals in a very pleasant, nicer side. No matter the type of animal, no matter its natural side, just showcasing the spectrum of empathy and emotions that are relative to those of humans. In the end, there is some, likely, truth to how humans and animals relate to the environment. In fact, after having seen Planet Earth, I see a lot of similarities to how life in New York goes by to how it is in the natural world. Emotions, it may seem that there is a lot in common as well. How our brains work, there may seem to be more differences but I guess it would not be too controversial to say all our brains are programmed in one way or another, to behave in relation to certain prompts in a specific way, to deal with the surrounding world in a specific way. And while we could argue that, for instance me assessing a white tiger to seem at least bored would seem a bit as if like anthropodenial, there might still be some truth to that in some degree.

One of the first observations I have made was, just how the animals were looking so well. Perhaps that is just how it is. It might also not be easy to assess this in a plain way. But still, I would figure animals in the wild would normally not be as well managed, I am curious how it is looking behind the scenes in such case. Having a variety of environments hosted in the Zoo is quite interesting too, temeprate climate, tropical. A variety of different animals of which activities were abreviated and elaborated by our wonderful guide. It was still an experience that I found as very positive and enriching as I just have not been in touch with a variety of animals for a while and I found a few quite very interesting. Like one bird that just flew down, as if to greet us. Some others that kept eyeballing us. And some others that decided to hide away in their terraria, which it was extremely difficult to actually locate, that's how well they camuflage themselves. Watching them perform such actions on youtube or netflix is very different compared to seeing them in real-life.

By the end of the tour, we decided to take a close look at a tree-panda. That's how I call them. They're actually called red pandas. They're an amazing species, as they're just simply cute, they don't quite look like pandas and they use trees as a way of moving around in a very simple way. They also are quite funny actually, there are some videos that showcase how they stand up on its feet and as if, try to scare a rock, just because they were surprised to see a rock on their way to, I don't know, just somewhere. So with that cute accent, we were about to do an ethogram on those two, by the end of our tour.

There were two issues: it was cold and the arbor under which we were placed was a bit letting through the snow that was on it. I usually don't deal with paper I just use my mobile device, surface to write stuff on. On just on a keyboard but with an actual digital pen. But I did not want to put my device at harms way and so I came up with a more neat idea: I'll just record the animal in 360 degreees and take some photos of it and then rewatch what it was doing and conduct an ethogram based on its movements. I feel this should actually go to the next blog but it's all part of the process, so.