This morning, I decided to make another trip to Seneca Park Zoo, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite spots to visit. In fact, today, I decided to pay for a membership. My annual membership fee gives me (and one adult guest, as well as my guest’s children, if any) free admission any of the 364 days a year that they’re open. I felt it was well worth it. And the money goes to help take care of the animals and other conservation projects.

Of coure, while there, I took some pictures with my camera. Again, I’m not going to post all of them (I took thirty in all). But I thought I’d share a few, just to give everyone a taste of my morning.

This next picture is of Ariel, one of the sea lions they have at the zoo:

Ariel has a playmate named Flounder. They were born about sixteen years ago (that’s about the time that Disney’s animation, The Little Mermaid, came out in case anyone’s wondering. I actually went back to this exhibit an hour after I took these pictures, as I discovered that they were giving a demonstration of Ariel’s and Flounder’s training at 11:30 this morning. I did not take pictures of the demonstration, as I wanted to be able to focus on enjoying my own experience of it. I hope to ge pictures of future demonstrations, however. The demonstration itself was quite interesting, as they explained some of the reasons they train the sea lions and what the process involves. Also, they explained some of the differences between a seal and a sea lion.

Not to far from Ariel and Flounder’s display, the polar bears have their exhibit. I was able to snap this excellent picture of the one polar bear going for a swim:

I got the distinct impression that he was checking me out as much as I was checking him out.

Surprisingly, the tigers were out in full force about the time I was getting ready to leave. So I was able to snap a couple of pictures. This young guy reminded me of a larger version of my little Precious, the way he was playing around in this tube:

Of course, the difference between him and Precious is that he’s big enough that he could do more than just nip my hand when he got hungry.

And of course, one of the other tigers was having fun playing king of the hill:

Overall, it was an enjoyable experience today.