The Zoo

We headed for the Tapei City Zoo on a miserable rainy weekday - perfect for keeping the crowds down if you don't mind a bit of drizzle yourself. The star attraction at the moment is the two pandas, called "Tuantuan" and "Yuanyuan", on loan from the PRC as part of their "Panda Diplomacy" program. "Tuanyuan" (團圓）means "reunion" or maybe even " to reunite", which leads me to wonder whether Tuantuan and Yuanyuan were destined from birth to be sent, together, to Taiwan - or if just possibly they were renamed specifically for their mission to Taiwan. How fortunate is it that the pandas who came next on the roster spelt-out "reunion"? How tragic would it have been if one had been called "naval" and the other had been called "blockade"? Anyway, we had "Yuanyuan" largely to ourselves, with maybe only 10-20 other people pressing themselves up against the glass on the enclosure. When we first arrived, Yuanyuan was doing the classic caged animal thing and wandering around and around in the same places, no doubt looking for a rock or blade of grass that she hadn't smelt a thousand times before, and wondering what it all meant. Eventually she climbed up into her bamboo-platform treehouse, chowed-down on some bamboo and went to sleep, doubtless to dream about the forests of Sichuan. After the pandas we went to look at the Taiwanese animal section, where the highlight was definitely the Formosan otter, who, just to continue the anthropomorphicism, looked to be enjoying itself playing in the water. From there we went to the insect section, where I recalled that the outdoor butterfly aviary could be pretty amazing on occasions. Winter probably isn't it's best season, so there really only appeared to be one species of butterfly happening.

One of the Taipei Zoo's flamingo colony.

The zoo is located in the lushly-forested foothills outside Muzha, an outer-suburb of Taipei.

Yuanyuan pacing out her enclosure.

The Taiwanese sika deer or 台灣梅花鹿.  The detector arrays at Sydney's Lucas Heights reactor are named after animals, mostly Australian animals like kangaroos, wallabies and wombats.  One of the arrays was made with Taiwanese co-operation and is called the "sika". 

Moss and fern-covered rocks inside the zoo.

A Taiwanese black bear.

I think this is a Taiwan tawny wood owl or 灰林鴞.

A display that allows you to inside an ants' nest.

A Formosan Macaque.