I spent several hours at the zoo today. A good zoo is one of the best things around, in my opinion. (I follow Gerald Durrell in defining a good zoo as one whose priorities are establishing breeding populations of threatened species, educating the public, and entertaining the public -- in that order.) I often spend most of my time there being amused by the activities of the larger primates, and I don't mean the ones in the cages.

There's always something interesting to see at the zoo. This time, one of the elephants was having its toenails done by a keeper. The elephant was standing patiently with each foot in a large, shallow dish of water, and raising one foot at a time for the keeper to attend to.

I also spent ages in the forest aviary watching four or five kakas (great big rust-coloured parroty things) on a tree stump about one foot away from me. This is one of those walk-through aviaries, so the birds are all around you if they choose to be, and seeing them this close is so cool.

I was also happy to see the big concrete dragon again. I used to climb all over it when I was a little kid. It was always one of the highlights of the zoo for me. It's been fixed up, repainted, and relocated since then. I still wanted to climb all over it. (There were too many little kids for me to do that. I'll go back some time when it isn't a school holiday.)

The most interesting thing I have *ever* seen at the zoo was a couple of years ago. (I told a few people at the time, but I thought it's still worth posting about, even belatedly.) One of the female orangutans had a hilariously cute baby, so their enclosure was attracting a lot of attention from zoo visitors, and mostly the orangs were just going about their business and ignoring the crowds. Until a woman holding a baby came up to the glass. Well, that orangutan mother's eyes lit up and she was over at the glass in front of the human mother in one second flat, peering at the human baby with tremendous interest and holding up her own baby proudly to be examined.

Astonishingly, the woman didn't seem to realise what was going on -- as far as she was concerned, it was just "Hey, great, it's come over to the glass, we can look at it better!" Eventually she and her family moved on. Five or ten minutes later, another family with a small child showed up, and exactly the same thing happened. It was no different from the way two human mothers might meet in a supermarket and start a whole conversation oohing and aahing at each other's babies. Even though she sadly wasn't getting the right response, you could see that orangutan was just *longing* to get down to a good gossip about the right age to start them on solids, how you can get them to sleep through the night, and, darling, if I have to eat ONE MORE flea off this kid I swear his older brother is PUTTING them on him behind my back.

It was the funniest, sweetest, most poignant, and most humbling example of animal behaviour I've seen. The thing that fascinates me is what an incredibly small difference there is between us and other animals, and yet that tiny difference is also the hugest gulf imaginable.