Gladys Porter Zoo, Brownsville, Texas

There is a lot to be seen in the town of Brownsville, we do hope to make at least one more trip there.  It is located about 60 miles south of McAllen.  Our main goal Thursday in traveling to Brownsville was to visit the zoo.   One resident of the zoo has been making the news lately, and she is the one who prompted us to make the trip there yesterday.  I am referring here to a female gorilla  born about nine weeks ago.  Apparently her mother did not have adequate maternal skills so the baby is being sent to the Cincinnati zoo on Friday where there is a surrogate mother available for her.  At the Porter zoo there is no lactating mom for her, but the greater issue is that her mom came from the Cincinnati zoo.  She was considered an outsider at the Porter zoo, and her baby would also be shunned by the female gorillas.

While at the zoo we stopped at the nursery were the baby gorilla was enjoying her morning bottle, in the above picture she is getting burped.  We were very fortunate that, shortly after we arrived at the zoo, a docent greeted us and encouraged us to take a tour of the zoo with him and his wife.  We informed him that we wanted to see the baby and it was one of the first stops on our tour.  We spent about 3 hours touring the zoo with the docents, and they made sure that we saw all of the highlights of the zoo.  The couple are Winter Texans from Canada and have been leading tours of the zoo for a couple of years now.  They were very informed regarding the different animals, even knew their given names.  The Tropical American and African sections of the zoo have a wide variety of orangutans, spider monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees.  Most of them were quite active while we were there, with young adult male gorilla's making their chest-thumping sounds, and mating calls.  We were also treated to the gymnastics of a female gibbon.

The spider monkeys have their own island with a moat around it.  From a distance they look quite human!

I was quite taken by the bright yellow hands of the golden handed tamarin monkey. He is from an area north of the Amazon River in Brazil and feeds mainly on fruit, seeds and insects.  I will have more pictures pertaining to the zoo in my next posting. I have so many to share with our readers as it was fairly easy to get close-up shots of many of the animals and birds as we toured the zoo.