Due to the fact that my supervisor will be, or should be, and possibly is, back from his holiday around now, I have been spending much of my time at the zoo trying to gather data for my masters project. I say trying because one might not really expect recording what a chimpanzee is doing to be a difficult endevour, but it is. Especially when the animal in question is a female with a very young baby who is very nervous.
This is what happened today. I was watching the chimp, rather successfully, until she decided to move to another area of her enclosure. I then moved to another area in order to get a good view of the chimp and try to figure out what she was up to. Helen was with me at the time and we both ran off to try spot the old female. She had other plans and eventually I gave up and we just went walking around the zoo. It was at this stage that we ran into the exciting occurance of the day!
We were walking past an enclosure that once housed some monkeys and now houses iguanas. Or, after today, iguana...We arrived at the scene just as one of the keepers realised that one of the iguanas had just escaped from the enclosure and was sunning itself in one of the flowerbeds! The keeper naturally tried to catch it and the thing ran off.
In no time a large herd of people, keepers and members of the public had arrived and were all trying to figure out what was going on. The keepers ended up chasing the iguana into a large storm drain thingy and spent much of their time wandering up and down the drain pipe. Helen and I both tried to do some searching ourselves but to no avial. It was gone.
So now there is an iguana in the drain at the zoo.
Darn...this isn't nearly as exciting as I expected it to be...I'll have to try harder next time.
Random Fact For The Day
The dot over the letter 'i' is called a tittle.
Here is a photo of me trying to write out a diary of what I'd been doing on the molerat trip:
that table cloth is hoooot
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