Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Where Could You Be? (Or, Our Trip to the Invisible Zoo.)

**My camera is still traveling with my daughter on vacation, so these photos are brought to you courtesy of my very old cell phone camera once again.**

I took Junior to the zoo. He wasn't excited about going until I told him we would see a tiger. That got his attention! He signed "tiger" and growled intermittently the whole way there.

First we saw the black swans exhibit.

Black swan, black swan, where can you be?

It consisted of a big empty area with a fountain and a pond and one lone duck.

Then we came to the chimpanzee exhibit.

I see tan ropes, empty as can be.

It was empty and under construction.

The wild dogs were nowhere to be seen, either.

Wild dogs, wild dogs, where can you be?

So we kept on walking.

A sign said the next enclosure was where the Takin (Takins? Takinusses? Takini?) lived. I was trying to remember what a Takin was and wondering how to talk about this animal to Junior. Was it like a deer? A cow? A pig? What the heck's a Takin?

It didn't matter.

I think Google Search is needed for me.

The Takin had been taken.

There were no lions or bears or elephants or giraffes, either.

But there were some cages with inhabitants that intrigued my son:

Wooly Ring-Legged Painterman

Brown Tufted Mowdegrasseus

We watched those cage-dwellers a while and Junior was content, though I was kind of wanting a refund.

The trip got a LOT more exciting and ended up being worth every penny (read Part 2 here!), but still, I felt compelled to compose the following letter To Whom It May Concern:

Dear Zoo,

Please get some animals.

Thank you,

Jujyfruit.