Some Like It Cold

Tonight, winter begins.  You'd think I'd be used to it by now (I mean, it does come this time every year), but somehow it always seems to catch me off-guard.  One day it seems like we're enjoying the perfect autumn - not too hot, not too cold - the next, we're in the single digits.  Heat lamps have to be strung.  Hoses need to be disconnected and rolled up every night so they don't freeze.  Wind blocks are erected.  Animals are brought inside for the winter.

Well, some of them are...

We don't get that many visitors in the coldest months.  Many of those that do come fall into two camps.  We have the people who complain that there are no animals out for them to see, and then we have the people who are amazed at how many animals there are outside.  There are some animals that no one seems surprised to see out in the middle of the winter - polar bears, wolves, and bison all come to mind.  There are other animals, however, which will surprise you.

Tigers and Leopards are normally thought of as cats of the jungle, living in hot, humid rainforests or sun-baked grasslands... and they do.  What a lot of people don't realize, however, is that they are also cats of the far north.  The Amur River region of northeast Asia is home to both tigers and leopards, distinguished from their southern kin by shaggier coats of fur.  In fact, the Amur tiger (formerly known as the Siberian tiger) is the largest living cat on earth.  Both the Amur tiger and the Amur leopard are critically endangered, and are the focus of AZA conservation breeding programs.

Monkeys might not strike many of us as cold-hardy creatures, and to be fair, most of them aren't.  An extraordinary exception, however, is the Japanese macaque, also known as the snow monkey.  Apart from humans, these monkeys - found on Japan's Honshu Island - are the most northern-living monkeys in the world.  How do they escape the cold conditions they encounter in the wild?  By taking hot baths - they will actually soak in hot springs to escape the chill of winter.



Flamingos are another animal that you wouldn't think of as handling the cold, but they can also surprise you.  Of the six species, three are found in the tropics while the other three - including the Chilean flamingo, one of the more common species in zoo collections - are inhabitants of some of the coldest, windiest, most desolate places on earth.  They have been observed standing in frozen ponds, ice forming around their legs.

Yet another group of birds that we associate with the tropics are the parrots - the quintessential jungle birds - but even here there are some cold tolerant species.  The kea of New Zealand is the world's only alpine parrot - they've been known to plague ski resorts in New Zealand, harassing tourists and demolishing unattended cars.  North America is home to its own cold hardy parrot - the thick-billed parrot of northern Mexico (yes, it's desert down there, but it still gets cold at night).

Truth be told, a lot of zoo animals are more cold hardy than we think they would be.  Part of that has to do with the fact that most of them were born in America or Europe, not in Africa, Asia, or South America.  Another part of it, I suspect, has to do with their history as species.  Many of the animals that we now find in Africa and Asia once had ranges that extended farther north and west, into Europe.  Lions, for instance, were found throughout Europe... remember all of those fables and Greek myths about lions?  These species, it seems, were intended to live in areas that were colder than they are now limited.

Of course, some animals are also less cold-hardy than we might expect.  Penguins are the perfect example; yes, there are penguins from the south pole, but most common in zoos are the temperate-zone species, like the African penguin and the Humboldt penguin.  Which reminds me...

Earlier this year, I was visited a colleague at Jacksonville Zoo, which boasts a handsome flock of Magellanic penguins, native to South America.  She told me that, during the winter, the temperature got so low a few nights that the penguins needed to be brought in.  That's right - it was too cold in Florida for penguins.