Animals’ paradise

ANIMALS’ PARADISE

Some days ago I took a night tour to Africam Safari’s park. This is one of the most beautiful and amusing natural parks in Mexico… it is located in Valsequillo, Puebla. Due to the design of the park and the ground’s characteristics where it is located, the animals live free to the open air. The park has become in a preservation, educational and research center. Africam lodgesabout two thousand animals of two hundred and fifty different species from over the world. Visitors can see the animals in their original habitats from their cars or the tour buses, as well as to interact with some of them. In Africam kids and grown ups learn to concern, protect and respect biodiversity through an exciting adventure.

Going to Africam zoo at night is only possible in the winterbreak ever since the day gets dark earlier and the animals’ behavior at night is more active than from the day. Since my family and I entered the park started enjoying the visit. The brightness of the stars illuminated the wonderful scenery that we were about to look.

In the first stage, Delta of Okavango, Africa’s continent, we knew lemurs (or night spirits in Latin), they are fromMadagascar; their eyes turn in red with the light during the night; a legend says that they bring bad luck to the natives, that is the reason why fourteen of their races disappeared and they are the last race endangered due to those false believes. In this stage are the ostriches too, the largest birds in the world; we learned that the females lay more than fifteen eggs at a time, then the male andfemale share their incubation. The male protects the eggs from predators during the night for the dark color of its feathers (black), while the female with brown feathers is in charge of keep them warm during the day; the brown shade of the female’s feathers mix up with the landscape of the arid days in Africa. Next we discover the giraffes that looked like elegant and distinguish queens of theSavannah. They must be alert from their major predator, the lion. Their name in Latin is camelo pardabis like the constellation that only can be seen in Europe. In la “Medieval Era” natives believed that the giraffe was a mixture of a camel and a leopard. Soon after we saw the antelopes from Delta of Okavango, they look like sentries. Their main characteristic is that their eyes seem to shine due to thetapetum lucidos they have inside their eyes, allowing them to reflect any ray of light no matter how small it is. They are able to see perfectly well in the night; hence they develop other senses such as: hearing, smell, and touch.

In the next stage we entered to the center of the African continent; all of us learned there that African natives make their huts with mud, straw and excrement.Inhabitants are used to put their lances on the huts’ roof; it means the battles won; they also put a mask to ward off evil spirits as well as a shield which meaning is that the hut belongs to a Mazai warrior. In this part we also met the berberia lambs. They have a long beard and light brown hairy skin; they go unnoticed during the day, but at night convert them in easy victims. They protectthemselves by using their big horns against their enemies, or climbing skillfully to the top of the heels. An Inca legend about these lambs say that when the old men were close to die they climbed up the mountain to the top and never returned, instead of natives saw the lambs coming down from the mountain; in this way the settlers believed that their relatives’ soul returned into the lambs body;consequently, they were considered as wisdom and sacred animals. After knowing this interesting tale, we ran into some beautiful llamas at the side of the road. They are gorgeous animals from los Andes, Peru. The Inca culture was devoted to observe the stars, they observed a constellation in shaped to the llama and named it Jacana. The wise men believed that Jacana protected their lands from floods...