On Friday the 13th our class Tercie B went to Pilsen Zoo with Mrs. Myslíková and Mrs. Šedivá. Mrs. Myslíková works in Zoo, so she gave us a lecture. We talked about topic Ethology which is a science about how animals behavior.
We walked through whole Zoo and always stopped on spots where Mrs. Myslíková was talking about some animal. Our first stop was the Berber lion. These lions live in packs and in each pack there is the head lion, the strongest one. Only he can breed with the females. When there is a new head lion in the pack (the old one dies or isn’t strong to fight the new one) he usually kills the cubs of the old one.
The next stop was a lake with some birds. Our teacher hid the plate with name of the bird and we had to guess what´s his name. No one knew the name, but finally Láďa said it. It was cormorant. Cormorants are black birds living in sub-polar areas. They haven’t got coccygeal gland (kostrční žláza) so they don’t slick their feathers. They nest in rocks in lakes, and they eat fish. How do they fly when they have wet wings and no slick feathers? They are drying their feathers, it’s called grooming.
When we ended with talking about cormorants, we moved to another spot – the austral wildlife. The Dingo dog that is the only kind of dog that isn’t barking. There are too many Dingo dogs in Australia eating the farmers´ sheep so the Australians have to build a big fence in the middle of Australia to protect the livestock. The kangaroos are the biggest marsupials now. There was one kangaroo with albinism there. It’s very unusual, but it happens to some kinds of animals. For example there can be white giraffe, white lion…there is an opposite of albinism too, where the animal is whole black.
After we talked about Australia, we moved to chimpanzees. They are very close to people with evolution. They can draw and figure out, how to conquer some hard situation. We had few more spots and talked about more animals than these.
It was very interesting day, where we got lots of new, interesting information.
Simona Melicharová, tercie B
