The San Diego Zoo is one of the top rated zoos in the world. The zoo is in Balboa Park, just minutes from downtown San Diego. It houses over 3,700 animals of more than 650 species and subspecies. On a previous trip to San Diego Ed and I spent a day at the zoo and managed to see most of it. Today we only have a few hours so we will only see part of it.

San Diego Zoo was one of the pioneers of creating natural habitats for the animals. Unfortunately, some of these habitats are older designs and are not "camera" friendly. The polar bear exhibit is a good example as there is no spot to view the bears that does not have "glass/plastic" in front of you, so Toronto Zoo you win on the that exhibit. The new koala habitat is amazing. Keep up the good work San Diego Zoo in you habitat rebuilding.

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Sleeping Koala (but then they sleep a lot), Polar Bear enjoying the beautiful day.

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We enjoyed watching this female polar bear playing and swimming.

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Maned Wolf

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Reindeer and a Jaguar

The Elephant Care Center lets you watch while the zoo keepers are taking care of the elephants.

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This guy has a sore foot --- one zoo keeper was scratching the elephant on the head to keep him amused while the other zoo keeper worked on the injured foot.

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A blood sample was taken from the back of the ear by one zoo keeper while the other zoo keeper kept putting treats in the elephants trunk.

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Secretary Bird

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The meercats are fun to watch and we did get a glance at the babies.

Bears are my favorite so I was a little disappointed today --- the line for the pandas was longer than I was willing to stand in (lots of school field trips today), a couple habitats are being worked on so the bears were off exhibit and others were sleeping.

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The Grizzly boys were napping.

The polar bears and this Andean bear lessened my disappointment

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Andean Bear. This guy is fast, he climbed a 12 foot poll in a couple of seconds.

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flamingos

The reason we only had a half day at zoo was due to the tour at the local PBS radio and television station. John and Carol are members of the station and were thus eligible to go on a tour. The general manager, who gave the tour, was a interesting and informative guide. I learned a lot about what goes on behind the scenes.

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The central hub for the television station. They monitor the feeds coming into the station (i.e. BBC, the PBS network, etc), and the feeds leaving the station (i.e. their shows on local cable stations, etc.)