Oregon Zoo

Who's the best father?

Atishwin the California condor

Packy the Asian elephant

Kiku the colobus monkey

The last time we did a post on CUTE ANIMAL PIX = STRESS RELIEF it was right after the 2007 Best of Eugene issue came out. For some reason it's the No. 1 all-time, most-viewed blog post. So, with our jam-packed Summer Guide finally over, we thought we'd do it again.
This time you get to vote for the 2008 Zoo Father of the Year. Full details below:

FATHER KNOWS BEST AT THE OREGON ZOO
Public invited to vote for the 2008 Zoo Father of the Year

PORTLAND, Ore. -- It's time for dads to take center stage, and the Oregon Zoo wants your help in choosing its Zoo Father of the Year for 2008. Atishwin the California condor, Kiku the colobus monkey and Packy the Asian elephant are this year's honored contenders. An on-line ballot featuring photos and short biographies of the zoo dads is posted on the zoo's Web site.

"We just finished a campaign for Zoo Mother of the Year, and found it was a fun way to initiate a relationship between the public and the highlighted animals," said Tony Vecchio, zoo director. "As the public reads about the nominees, all of which belong to species that are either threatened or endangered, we hope they'll come to understand and care about the challenges facing these animals in the wild."

Online votes will be accepted until 5 p.m. Thursday, June 12. The zoo will announce its 2008 Zoo Father of the Year Friday, June 13, at 10 a.m.

Just got this in the in-box from the Oregon Zoo. I ... I ... can't really talk about it. So I'll give it to you.

Who: Meerkats, polar bears and sun bears enjoy Thanksgiving a day early.

What: Meerkats tear apart a papier-mâché turkey filled with crickets; sun
bears attack a 100-pound ice treat filled with delicious berries and
pumpkins, topped off with a cardboard turkey; meanwhile, the polar bears
feast on a layered pumpkin "ice pie."

...

Why: Animal enrichment helps mentally and physically engaged zoo animals by
giving them new and unexpected experiences.

Thanks to the Interwebs, even zoos are becoming more democratic, allowing webbies to vote on the name of a baby ocelot, among other things. Well, now you web-folk can choose which animatronic dinosaurs to install in the Oregon Zoo’s upcoming exhibit on the prehistoric animals.

There’s something about dinosaurs that is hard to comprehend — given their size, grotesque features and all-around brutality towards each other — thus giving them a seemingly mythological status, like unicorns or sasquatch. However, my Moab, Utah-based geological surveyist brother keeps finding dinosaur fossils in the broken up concrete in his backyard (apparently dinosaur bones were seen as structurally-sound material in 1921). So a zoo exhibit with “realistic” dino robots may be the kind of “seeing is believing” evidence we all need to make these creatures come alive in our minds.

My vote is totally for the Kentrosaurus (a Stegosaurus cousin), Pachycephalosaurus (you might remember them from The Lost World: Jurassic Park), Torosaurus (related to the Triceratops, only more bullish), Velociraptor (for sheer creepiness factor) and, of course, Brachiosaurus (for its size and the fact you probably will be able see it from Hwy. 26). Everyone will pick the T-Rex, so that beast goes without saying.