Sleepy koalas and invisible wolves

My mother wanted to see the koalas that are on loan to the Stone Zoo in Stoneham, MA before they depart in September. She brought this up several times in the past few weeks, until we finally decided to go earlier this morning. Now, I thought she was crazy to want to go this week, since the last weather report I heard prior to this decision was that it was going to rain for the rest of the week. She informed me that the updated weather report predicted thunderstorms, but not until later in the afternoon. Convinced that she was insane for planning a trip to the zoo on the same day that thunderstorms were predicted, I nevertheless agreed to go with her.

The Stone Zoo seemed really small compared to the Denver Zoo, which I visited only a couple of weeks ago. That's not really a criticism, it's just that it felt small by comparison. The whole experience was eerily familiar, as we immediately set out for the koalas, pretty much ignoring everything on the way to their enclosure. This was exactly what I did at the Denver Zoo, only in that case I was obsessing over the Komodo Dragons. Anyway, we successfully located the cute little marsupials, who were hanging out in their trees in their typical drug-induced haze. I admired their extra opposable thumbs, which, combined with the fact that they spend their entire lives partially sedated by eucalyptus, proves that they are our evolutionary superiors. There's only so long you can watch a fuzzy little grey thing blink sleepily at you before you decide to go look for the snow leopards and jaguars, though, and so we eventually moved on.

Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was too early in the morning, but just about everything else was also either asleep or nearly so. The notable exceptions were the Mexican Gray Wolves. One of them them seemed to be walking laps around the enclosure, until a large group of loud children arrived, and she decided to run laps around the enclosure. It's not as if she was actually fleeing from the children, though - she could have done that much more effectively by going into the middle of the place, or the far end, or even the enclosed area out of the sun. But, for whatever reason, we got to see her walk/run by us a couple dozen times at least. I attempted to take several pictures, many of which are probably incredibly blurry. Still, I made a valiant effort.

We thought we saw a couple of other wolves, but we weren't sure how many of them might have been the same wolf. We could only be certain that there were at least 2, since that was the largest number of them that we saw together at one time. On the way out, we asked a zoo employee how many wolves there actually are in the wolf area.

It turns out that there are 3 of them. She was amazed that probably saw all of them - or that we saw any of them at all. Apparently, the presence of the wolves at the zoo is mostly so the zoo can participate in the captive breeding and release program to try to repopulate what it turns out is an insanely rare species of wolf. If zoo patrons happen to see one, that's a great bonus, but apparently several days can often go by without a single visitor to the zoo seeing one of the wolves. They hate people, and actively shun the zoo staff. Of course, since the program exists to repopulate wild wolves, the zoo staff doesn't actually want the wolves to grow used to human contact, so this suits everyone just fine.

So it turns out we were very fortunate indeed, since we got to see what is probably the most elusive animal in the whole place, and the torrential thunderstorm that wiped out several traffic lights in the area waited until after we left the zoo to strike. Keen!