There were also two new kids on the block: Arthur and Millie. They were very young having arrived the previous November from Australia via Brookfield Zoo in Chicago as orphans after their mothers had been killed in South Australia.
It wasn’t that long ago that one could see the Himalayan tahrs at the Toronto Zoo all year round as there was foot access to the path that runs past their enclosure. Nowadays, these cute ungulates are only really visible from the Zoomobile (at the very beginning of the route) which doesn’t run through the winter.
The first time I ever saw Kenora I don’t recall any special feelings towards it. Well, as I discovered on my next trip to Kenora 33 years later, the problem was that we approached it from the wrong direction: from the east.
I was drawn, as you will no doubt be shocked to learn, to the Penguin Beach exhibit, at which we arrived about an hour after entering the Zoo. A large colony of over 90 Humboldt penguins resides there, and at that time they had exactly one very sociable rockhopper penguin named Ricky living amongst them.
The two young cats were born at the Nashville Zoo in 2013 – Mingma in February and Pavarti in April – and arrived in Toronto as a “breeding pair” in the late Winter or early Spring of 2014. They took quite a while to get used to their new digs – and, oddly, to each other even though it was thought they were already bonded when they arrived.
Her name. Well, because she was born on November 11th, which is Remembrance Day here in Canada, the vets and techs in the Health Centre gave her a nickname they thought appropriate for the date. And, unlike with the nicknames that had been given to her older brothers, the Zoo decided that this time there would be no naming contest and just went ahead and made her name official. And that is how she came to be called…
The Grumpy Penguin 