A Birthday for a Walrus
Jul 25
Last month Caleb and I went to the walrus’ birthday at the Point Defiance Zoo. His name is E.T. And yes we have an annual pass to go see him whenever we want to. We really like walruses.
At the moment there are also two female walruses on loan from the San Diego Zoo. It’s E.T.’s harem. They are supposed to make baby walruses together, I hope they succeed this year. You have no idea how excited I will be if there are walrus pups to see. Though I’m just excited that there are three walruses at the zoo right now. There’s only about 13 or so in captivity in the U.S. Maybe even the world. They don’t really do well in captivity since they are such social animals. And it’s hard to house a herd of walruses.
Anyway. E.T.’s birthday. He was turning 38. Or 32. Something old. Walruses generally only live to be 35-40 years, so he’s an old guy. He’s been at Point Defiance since he was a pup, rescued from the waters of Alaska. His birthday party consisted of him doing a few tricks and then blowing the herring candles out on his cake. No, really, he blew them out. You should have been there.
Did I mention that we went to two of the three “parties”. We waited for 45 minutes for the second one to start so we could get front row seats. We have a problem. Is there a Walrus Lovers Anonymous?
Who can blame you? Walruses are awesome! I was crushed when I read that Lolrus had died. Hopefully he found his bucket first!
This is walrus-unrelated (although walruses are pretty cool!) but I was poking around here after linking you in my recent post, and came across your resume website. I’m a little freaked out – I’m a UW Communications grad too (although not heading back to grad school anytime soon!) and I also did Running Start in high school. I only did it for my senior year, but still. Crazy! :)
Oh what a fun adventure! That guy is HUGE!! They had a monkey birthday at the zoo where I live and I wanted to go, it looks like so much fun!