Moncton [UPDATED]

Our vacation this year was spent on the east coast of NB, along the Acadian Coast. The focus of the trip was Kougibougouac National Park - more about that later - but we established ourselves at Richibucto, roughly in the middle of the part of the province we wanted to explore, and spent some time getting to know our Acadian neighbours.


The week started out decidedly iffy - lots of sun/cloud/shower changes, and cool, all day Sunday and Monday - so on Monday we decided to head south to Moncton to visit the Magnetic Hill Zoo. More than anything we wanted to see the new lion cubs, a male and a female, that the zoo had recently brought in to keep company with Kito, the resident 10-year-old lioness who lost her mate in January.

The cubs are a male and a female, and the photo at the top of this post is of the young lioness.


This is the male. We made a point of being around for feeding time and as you can see, he is, um, feeding. You may also note that his mane is just starting to come in.






This is an olive baboon, who was being fed cherry tomatoes by his keeper when we visited.






And this, I believe, is a white-handed gibbon. (I lost my zoo map.) He was putting on an aerobatics show, swinging around wildly on the firehose strung throughout his habitat.


Having visited the zoo before, we spent most of our time at the lion and primates exhibits. (Tomar the tiger, who was the zoo's main attraction at the time I wrote the post I just linked to, has since passed away of age-related causes. He is gone but clearly not forgotten; a large portrait of him overlooks the visitor's centre, a path in the zoo has been named after him, and I bought a t-shirt with his handsome face on it at the gift shop.)


The showers held off all day and it was a good way to start the vacation.


Now if only the rest of the week would see improving weather so we could get to a key feature of the vacation - the beach!!

ronnie