This past weekend our friend Danita was in town visiting. To kick things off I dragged her and MJ out of bed at 7AM to head to the San Francisco Zoo!
This year we missed the annual March of the Penguins where the new baby penguins of the year are introduced to the colony on penguin island at the zoo (we went in 2011). So when the opportunity to do Breakfast with the Penguins came up on a weekend I’m not travelling I couldn’t resist.
The event kicked off at 8:30 with check in and hot breakfast in the main hall, a building I hadn’t been in before. As we finished eating there was a short presentation by the head penguin keeper about the history of the penguin colony at the zoo and the work they’re doing now. Plus, lots of pictures of baby penguins!
Then the really fun part began – seeing the penguins! There were over 100 people attending the event, so we were split up into 2 classrooms in the building for our penguin visit. Inside the classroom we sat in a large circle as the keepers brought in 2 penguins to run around the room!
The first two were 5 month olds who favored one corner of the room (not ours!) so they swapped penguins with the other room and that seemed to work out better, we got another 5 month old and a baby from last year named Eduardo who stole the show with his hyperactivity and how social he was.
Here’s Eduardo and my knee! Naturally when a penguin is right there next to me I am taking bad photos :)
You could tell which was the 5 month old penguin, she has her first year coloring:
And Eduardo didn’t jump on us, but he did come by to visit Danita a few times, I managed to get this picture:
In all, a memorable event and totally worth waking up early for. We’ll have to go again next year!
While we were at the zoo we also did some visiting with some of the other animals in the zoo, getting to see the baby tiger Jillian, who is looking less and less like a baby…
And Erin the giraffe, who was never small, and is only getting bigger!
More photos from the penguin encounter and the rest of the zoo here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157635135525958/