#smithsonian national zoo

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Prairie Dog

Smithsonian National Zoo

By Miki Jourdan

[seathernycolors]

Last week I took a trip to the Smithsonian Bird House! Here's a small selection of the birds I saw drawn in a little sketch spread.

[paulpingminho]

[amerart]

turtle :)

[sabistarphotos]

December 27, 2022

Zoolights, Smithsonian National Zoo

Washington DC

[hellbraiser]

Seals are dogs

@the Smithsonian national zoo

[fenthebonebreaker]

Daily doodle #0009

Zoolights at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington D.C.

Combined two of @onedoodleaday's prompts: Draw a scene at the zoo. / Make a line drawing without picking up your drawing utensil.

Sadly, no live elephants were seen. There *was* an illuminated elephant fountain though!

[suira-the-demon]

I went to DC this past week here are some of my favorite pictures that i took

[z34l0t]

"An old Rilke poem describes the pacing of a caged animal as a ritual dance of “powerful soft strides … around a center / in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.” Depression is the word we use to describe a paralysis of will, and captivity inflicts a special form of it on animals, which we call “zoochosis.” Those suffering from it sometimes pluck their own fur compulsively, and may even mutilate themselves. These are obvious signs that something is amiss with an animal, but a fox may be attuned to others that are less legible to us."

"At the back of Bird House, the fox may have noted the way the 74 flamingos ambled across their nearly 10,000-square-foot enclosure. Something about their movements may have struck him as curious. Great hunters of birds, foxes have cognitive processes that may contain an algorithm alerting them when an animal’s wings aren’t working. In the wild, some flamingos power up to Andean peaks or glide, pelicanlike, for miles along the coast. But not these flamingos. They were permanently grounded when zoo staffers removed their flight feathers three days after they were born, to make sure they wouldn’t escape their enclosure."

"Wing clipping is cruel in part because it shrinks a bird’s world: A land animal’s range is a two-dimensional shape on a map, but a flying being can explore a truly voluminous chunk of the Earth’s atmosphere. Grounded birds are also more vulnerable to mass slaughter. If a fox came upon a flamingo flock in the wild, he’d be lucky to get his teeth into one before the rest flew away. But the zoo’s flamingos would never fly away, even under direct attack. They couldn’t. They were trapped like hens in a coop."

[...] ✂️

"Sara Hallager arrived at the Bird House just after 6 o’clock that morning. As the zoo’s head curator for birds, Hallager makes sure to check on the animals first thing when she works the early shift, methodically looking in on the cranes and herons. When she reached the flamingo enclosure, she was alarmed to find herself eye to eye with the fox. Not all foxes react skittishly upon spotting a human, but this one seemed to have consciousness of guilt. “As soon as he saw me, he ran away through the hole in the fence that he had created,” Hallager told me. Any hopes that the fox had just arrived were dashed when she saw that pink-feathered mayhem was strewn across the enclosure’s bare soil and in its shallow pool. “I could already see a large number of dead flamingos,” Hallager said."

[...] ✂️

"I asked Amaral whether there was any internal dissent about killing the fox. He told me that no one had lodged any objections, so far as he could recall. This unanimity among the staff surprised me. It struck me as contrary to the zoo’s spirit. At the very least, it seemed like a failure of imagination. Surely an institution devoted to caring for animals should have found a way to spare the fox. Why not relocate him to a forest across the Anacostia River?"

[...] ✂️

"I left the zoo unsettled. I couldn’t shake the sense that the fox had been wronged. The very next night, I experienced a visitation. In the predawn hours, I awoke to a sudden, high-pitched scream. For 30 seconds, I laid still in bed, thinking that the sound was a remnant of an unremembered dream. When I heard it again, I leapt up to my window and swept the curtains aside. To my astonishment, a fox was sitting on the sidewalk directly in front of my house, screeching into the dark wintry air, trying desperately to summon a mate. This went on for several minutes until headlights beamed down the street and he fled."

[the-birth-of-art]

The Smithsonian has made over 4,000,000 images in its archive open source.

An example:

Fishing Cat, Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. Photo by Mehgan Murphy.

[istandonsnowpiles]

Panda at Panda Palooza

[paulpingminho]

[petsincollections]

Red Pandas, or Lesser Pandas, at National Zoological Park, 1973

Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 11-009, Image No. 73-3841

Smithsonian Institution Collections

[fridaybear]

[tiny sloth bear roar] IT'S FRIDAY! You did it. Be kind to one another. Lead with love. See y'all next week. 🐻 - - - - - - -

"Sloth Bear Cub Debuts at the Smithsonian's National Zoo" by Smithsonian's National Zoo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.