Animals (1)

The

Germans (and all continentals, as far as I can tell) have a different attitude towards conkers. When I see conkers lying on the ground, I can barely resist the urge to scoop them all up and take them home. (Actually, I don't resist the urge, but I usually only pick up a couple). People from other countries don't seem to realise what prized possessions they are, and ignore them - one sees huge piles of them on the ground, in the middle of cities. We visited an animal park type of place (a bit like a zoo) in Bielefeld. Outside was a trailer and two large containers, full of conkers. I started to fill my pockets (as you would), imagining that they had picked these up and place them here so that people would take them away. But I had it the wrong way around. You were supposed to give them the conkers you have collected, and they feed them to their pigs.

Shocking.

We arrived (coincidentally) at feeding time for the bear. (It used to be bears, but one of them is no more). Opa always brings the boys to look at the bear(s) and they usually have no interest, and wander away, leaving Opa disappointed. Most commonly they see something boring and commonplace and get much more excited about that than about the bear in the distance ("Leaf!" or "Cow!").

This time it was feeding time. The bear was was given a selection of fruit and vegetables (or fruits and vegetables, as it always says here), and two dead pigeons. To make things more exciting for the bear, the foodstuffs are hidden around the enclosure. The bear found a carrot first, but moments before it ate the carrots, it smelled (I'm guessing) the pigeons, spat out the carrots, and extracted the pigeons from the cranny they had been placed in.

The bear made fairly short work of the pigeons - it chose to pull or bite bits from the pigeons, rather than chew it up and swallow them whole, but the ease with which it pulled the wings off before eating them made me even less anxious to meet a bear that didn't have an electric fence separating me from it.

The boys have become enthusiastic about taking photos with my camera. This means we get a lot of duff photos, and the odd reasonable one. It also removes any burden I might have felt to document our lives. Here's a couple of the more successful ones.

First, a bear with two pigeons in its mouth:

A deer. Aim: Good. Angle: Poor.