Different Trails

REPTILE GARDENS (Day 3 - part 3)

The Sky Dome

Fall gardens

Orville (hatched 1905, 500 lbs), Tank (1963, 550 lbs), Samson (1988, 500 lbs), Hugo (2003, 260 lbs), Ken (2006, 164 lbs) and Peabody (2007, 139 lbs)

I can't tell who is who, but I suspect the older ones are on the right, in the separate pen.

Aldabra tortoises are found off the Seychelles Islands, north of Madagascar. They are vegetarians and don't require drinking water
(they get all the water they need from their diet). The oldest recorded age is 152 years.

These are black-tailed prairie dogs. The town is separated into family groups called coteries. These usually include one male, 1 - 4 females and their young. The largest recorded town covered 25,000 square miles in Texas, with some 400 million prairie dogs.

The vertical shafts extend 7 - 10 feet underground, but can go as deep as 15 - 20 feet. I like how they have a Listening or Barking room!

Say, if you want to come back to my burrow a bit later, we could .... Wait, are we being watched?

A short, very low tunnel led underground to this plastic bubble located at dog-level!

This small squirrel was obsessed with collecting the berries from this tree. She would bound up the tree, grab a long twig of berries, then race off to bury it nearby. She would instantly run back up the tree, grab another mouthful and scurry off to bury them as well. Over and over! I got tired simply watching her!