Biting the Ear that Feeds You at the Jacksonville Zoo

Today it’s snowing. Again. Not that I don’t enjoy a bit of winter wonderland, but by mid March I’m thinking, sheesh. Enough already. It’s even harder since Mark and I were in Jacksonville visiting family over the weekend. Even there they were having a cool weekend, but we got out to the Jacksonville Zoo on Sunday and it was a brilliant sunny day with a high in the upper sixties. Felt great after all the cold weather up here in Falls Church.

I was so impressed with the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens. It’s an old zoo, founded in 1914, but it was completely redesigned in the 1990s and feels very modern. The animals are THIS CLOSE. All day I kept saying things like, “I’ve never been that close to a giraffe… a jaguar… an anteater… a lion.” I now have a collection of animal photos that look like something out of National Geographic.

The first thing I usually want to see at any zoo are the birds, especially if they have a free-flight aviary. The Jax Zoo has two. We went to the one in their Australian section where there are lorikeets flying around free. Lorikeets are brilliantly colored birds from New Guinea; as you can see in the photo of my husband with a friend, they look like small parrots or really big parakeets. I was delighted to find out that for a dollar you can buy a small cup of fruit nectar and feed the birds by hand. Our instructions were “hold on tight, or they’ll pull the cup out of your hand!” And with that we went into the flight cage.

Almost immediately we had interested birds hopping onto our hands and shoulders. You can see by the look in my eyes that I was thrilled. At one point I had two on my shoulders and another on my hand, drinking the nectar by dipping its tongue into the cup and lapping up the juice. One of the birds on my shoulder got frustrated at having to wait, and started poking into my hair. Next thing I knew, he’d grabbed my ear and tweaked it, hard. Ooww! Yes sir, Mr. Bird! Let me get a nectar cup for you right away!