Vern

The kids have always loved animals so we maintain a membership at the LA Zoo. As zoo's go LA's is not bad but it has often bothered me that some of the enclosures were in obvious need of an upgrade. Last year the zoo began major renovations and Saturday night we attended an event to mark the opening of the new sea lion exhibit.

We'd already seen the new exhibit but the member events are always a great opportunity to go to the Zoo when it's closed to the public in the evening and the animals are usually more active than during the heat of the day. What we really went to see was how Vern was progressing.

Vern is a baby Sifaka, a kind of Lemur, and he was born at the zoo this past spring. Adam and I go the most often and we fell in love with this little fella the first time we saw him and I have been going as often as we can to see how he is growing.

We've watched him grow from a tiny little thing, virtually all arms, legs and tail into quite a handsome young guy. His Mom is very loving and attentive and the first few times we saw him he was clinging firmly to her back. On our last visit he'd doubled in size and was starting to imitate the other Sifaka's leaping from tree to tree but not straying too far from Mom.

On this most recent visit he'd doubled his size again and we watched him wear out his family with about 40 minutes of hard playing. Vern's got quite a personality and it's probably my imagination but I could swear he enjoys people watching his antics.