Adventure at Goat Island

Goats are the GOAT!

When was the last time you were at the zoo?

I am a member of the Buffalo Zoo and so I wander in and out at will. Over the weekend I walked around for a bit doing drawings and seeing how the animals were doing.

And I went into Goat Island! The video above shows a bit of my adventure.

Goat Island is open only seasonally, and I believe it is open only on weekends. After next weekend it will be closed until the spring. I am going to try to go again next weekend! Petting these goats was an experience I have not had since I was 5. My mother always used to tell the story of how a goat began eating my dress.

Even when I was little I wore dresses to the zoo!

People either like the zoo or they do not. I have made the mistake of bringing friends to the zoo who have a problem with it. Now I generally go by myself because I have no problem with it.

I think it is a wonderful thing that kids — or grownups, like me — who are interested in science or art can see what animals look like in person. We do not all have the money to go on safari.

There is nothing like seeing a bison up close!

The giraffes are also a wonderful sight up close. One docent at the zoo told me that the giraffes are most impressive when they are in the giraffe house. That is his favorite place to view them. Outside they are pretty, but they are not looming over you the way they are inside.

Above is a video I took a little while ago. I love the giraffe house, that sound you get when you are in there, a kind of humming, that electronic sound you hear in the video. It illustrates that you are entering a different world, a different dimension.

That Rothschild giraffe! He is the biggest. See, I am an expert now.

It helps to keep in mind that these animals’ native habitats, they are not La La Land. There is always some predator waiting to gobble them up. Like the hawk I saw in Delaware Park, and in Forest Lawn, he could not just enjoy his squirrel in peace. He kept looking up and down and all around, clearly concerned that a rival would want to grab his kill.

I’ll bet that squirrel would have loved to have been a zoo animal! I am just saying. Outside the zoo, life is no picnic for these animals.

Except for maybe the hippo. Howard sent me this video. “Hippo is a big boss | Top management | CEO of the water.” It is true!

I love how world-weary the hippo looks. How the crocodiles do not give him any trouble. They scurry to get out of his way.

It is fun to see little kids at the Buffalo Zoo fascinated by the animals. However they have short attention spans, and sometimes I think it is a pity that people now seem to have the idea that the zoo is only for little kids in strollers. The old scholarly signs with the Latin names that used to identify the animals when I was a kid, they are gone now.

Also long gone is that old sign at the reptile house that used to tell you not to rap on the glass. The sign had a warning cartoon showing a man rapping on the glass, the glass breaking, and a snake jumping out at him.

Now, we can’t have signs like that. They would be too scary. That is a pity. The zoo is kind of like confession. It is wasted on the young.

Speaking of confession…

… there is this classic Hitchcock film “I Confess,” about that very topic.

How could we have any discussion about confession, as we did last week, without mentioning this?

Alfred Hitchcock was Catholic and apparently worked on this movie for a long time trying to get it right. The movie’s hero is a good priest, played by Montgomery Clift, a Father What-a-Waste if ever there was one. The priest employs a husband-and-wife couple as a housekeeper and caretaker. The husband goes and commits a murder and the priest winds up blamed for it. He cannot reveal what the man has told him in the confessional.

The moral of the story: Same as the moral for the Frank Lloyd Wright book “Loving Frank” that we talked about a couple of weeks ago.

Don’t have servants!

A reminder to me: Here I am out petting goats and wandering in the Cheektowaga wilderness.

What I really should be doing is cleaning my house!