Australia: Flying Foxes

We love foxes, and we love bats.  When we realized that Cairns had a colony of flying fox bats, we sought them out.  It wasn’t hard—you can hear them from a few blocks away.  And while we thought they were pretty visibly obvious—you know, Chihuahua sized animals with yard/meter wingspans swooping over head—we were consistently amazed by how many people only glanced up at them after wondering what we were taking pictures of.  In one case, a woman who’d been walking along, perfectly safe, looked at David panning his zoom lens along with a bat, looked where he was pointing, and shrieked and cowered on the ground for nearly 5 minutes before scurrying off in a crouch like she was in a war zone.  Most people were delighted by their chance glance up, however.

Singapore Zoo

We’ve been to a lot of zoos in our time, and often they just make us sad. I don’t want to sound smug, but when you’ve seen animals in the wild, in their natural habitats, it’s harder to see them in zoos without just feeling bad for the animal, about the zoo, and a little bit bad about yourself for paying for it.  There are exceptions, of course, and we’ve seen wonderful zoos in San Diego, Auckland (and others I’m forgetting). We almost didn’t go to the Singapore zoo, mostly because it involved what seemed like a complicated bus trip, but we’re so glad we did. It’s definitely a zoo that you’ll leave feeling glad that you went.