Hey fella.. got some candy?
Hi Gram!
We’ve been having a great time down here. The weather is cool, but moderate. We wear a hoodie sweatshirt and hat when we go out most days, sometimes a jacket, but it hasn’t been warm enough for a t-shirt or shorts yet. The temperature has dipped a little for the past few days, but yesterday we decided to get out of the house for more than a light stroll or errands. We headed up to the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch and Petting Zoo just north of Tucson and had such a great time! They started as just an ostrich ranch years ago, and have added all sorts of animals to feed. The donkeys, the first enclosure we came to, poked their heads through openings in the fence and plead with their eyes to just give a little food to a poor starving donkey. We played along and offered pellets from our outstretched hands, but we were never fooled into thinking the children before us had let them starve. Next we brought our sticks with bird feed stuck to one end over to the parakeet enclosure. If you poke just the end through, they would grip onto the fence and eat from the stick. Push it through a little further, and one or two of them would perch on the stick, where they could get a better position to eat and fend off the other birds. It was fun bouncing the stick and wiggling it back and forth and watching the birds go for a ride while they munched on the treat at the end. Onto the enclosure to our right, we found fallow deer, who were nonchalant, with a passive attitude that said “oh, you have food? well I suppose I could eat…” Zibby and I took turns feeding the deer for a moment before she spotted the goat penthouse. Every morning, the farmers load the first few goats through the gate into a scissor lift that hoists them far into the air where they can get a view of their surroundings. Goats love to be as high as they can to survey the predators below. In this case, they just love being far above as customers race each other to send food up on a hand-cranked conveyor belt.
Here, Deer. We’ll take our lunch in the penthouse, Jeeves. 
They even have a little “kissing booth” where you can put food in your lips and they’ll reach out with their lips to grab it from yours. Some of the braver people were lining up to take each other’s pictures kissing a goat, but neither of us had any desire to kiss a goat, much less document it on film. It was still fun holding a piece between finger and thumb and letting the goats plea with their lips as you fed it to them. The ostriches, however, were not patient, and didn’t want to wait to be fed. The fence had chutes built in where you could drop some pellets into a chute on the human side of the fence and it would drop down to a holding tray on the ostrich side. Ostriches have long necks, though, and would just reach over the fence and try to eat out of the cup in your hand. We adopted a strategy of holding the cup away with one hand while dropping some pellets in the chute with the other hand. They still reached over to see if they could snap some food from our hands, but they’d see us reaching for the chutes and knew they’d better get their head back to the other side of the fence where the food was about to drop before any of their companions got to it first. On the ranch’s website FAQ, someone asked if customers could ride the ostriches. Their answer? “They are really fast and really dumb… that’s a bad combination!” We didn’t quite understand how dumb they were until Zibby tried tossing food to one of them over the fence. She tossed the pellet in a perfect arc toward his mouth but he just stared as it bounced off his nose and onto the ground. A sign to one side of the fence said that their eyeballs were bigger than their brains, and I don’t doubt it.
We had three tokens each in case we wanted food for the smaller animals, and found our way over to the chicken coop next. Our neighbor back home has some chickens and Zibby and I both love to talk to them as we come and go from the house. It was fun feeding these chickens and watching them as they tilt their heads, rolled in the dirt, and just acted like silly chickens. Next up were the St Croix sheep, which were brought over from the virgin islands. They reminded me a little of dogs, as they would put one leg up on the fence and reach for our outstretched hands. They looked a little like the neighbor leaning over the fence, asking “hey, what’ve you got there?” Their lips and fur were very soft as they gingerly reached over and took a pellet from my hand. Next door were more goats (the third enclosure for the goats – I think children really like kids). The fence had openings framed in where the goats could stick their head through, and that’s where most people fed them. There were a couple goats, however, that would wriggle their way in between the ones with their head through the fence and put their lips up against the fence. I felt bad for them, being bullied away from the feeding holes, so I kept holding food through the fence for them to grab. Zibby rationed her food well as we made the rounds, but I was apparently a little stingy. I still had almost half of my big animals cup left and no more big animals. We doubled back and fed the cutest of the animals and watched kids get scared by the ostriches. Every few feet, there were signs warning that the big birds will bite, and instructing us to keep our cups away but I saw more than one ostrich head jot down and send a cup go flying. Eventually, I was out of food for the big animals and we went to feed the bunny rabbits. I think a gaggle of little humans had been there just before us to stuff the cute bunnies with food, though. There were a few piles of food scattered about and most of the bunnies didn’t seem very hungry. Cute? Very! Just not hungry. The second to last stop was full of ducks, which we decided to sit back and watch for a moment, but elected not to feed them. Zibby had a childhood trauma getting bitten by a duck or goose or something, so she had no interest, and I was tiring of these freeloaders taking food from me without so much as a “thank you” or even a curtsy.
Our final stop was the rainbow lorikeet enclosure, and they were definitely in my top three, if not my all time favorite animal to feed there. We first walked through a double door vestibule, where the outside door has to be closed before you can open the inside door. We each had a plastic ramekin containing sweet nectar that is apparently all the rage in lorikeet circles. We held the little cup in one hand and walked into the coop as they fluttered around us. The first to approach us must’ve been new to the whole game, because it landed on Zibby’s head and looked around to see if there was any food up there. Meanwhile, his more experienced colleagues went straight for the wrist and playfully pulled the lid off to get at their sweet treasure, silently judging the dunce that was capping their patroness. I had them eating from my right hand when I realized that I needed that hand to reach my phone. I transferred the cup to my left hand, expecting the lorikeet to follow the food. She was stubborn and liked that right arm, so I just slowly lowered my hand to my pocket and she clung tighter and tighter until my arm was almost vertical. Finally, realizing she couldn’t hold on much longer, she fluttered down to the bench a few feet away. As soon as I got my phone out, a couple of birds flocked to my right wrist to inspect the phone. None of them tried to peck at it or anything, they just inspected it inch by inch to see what promises it might hold. Once we were both out of food, we walked around and tried to pick them up with a finger. Zibby taught me that if you just put your finger in front of a bird and push against the chest, it hops up onto your finger. Most of the birds were happy with this game, although a couple pecked at my finger as if to say “not this time, buddy, I have important perching to do on this branch.” Oh, and did I mention that these birds who eat an entirely liquid diet also poop liquid often? After a precocious little friend, surveying the surroundings from my head, pooped a stream down my hat, we decided to clean up and move along so others could have the joy of projectile pooping rainbows.
What’s down this sleeve? 
I wonder what my friends are doing? 
Nothing interesting here, better check Facebook… 
After feeding all those animals, and ready for lunch ourselves, we remembered that Zibby had a token to feed the cownose stingrays right next to the gift shop. Aren’t stingrays an ocean animal you ask? Aren’t we in the desert of Arizona, where there’s no oceanfront property? Well, when you want the children to squeal with glee, I guess you import some stingrays and build a holding tank. The caretaker explained how to feed them and gave us a little back story (they’re called cownose because from the underside, their heads look like the nose of a cow.) She had three pieces of food to deliver by holding it between her fingers and reaching into the tank, and she giggled a little each time. With no more food, we walked through the gift shop to see all the kitschy shirts, feather dusters, and keychains available and found out that ostrich eggs are equivalent to 24 chicken eggs. We escaped with just a few trinkets and made our way to the car.
We packed a cooler before leaving the house, so next on our agenda was finding somewhere to soak in the sun while we satisfied our hunger. Picacho state park is just down the road, so we headed there to see if they had a picnic table we could use. There were no picnic tables before the admission gate, and it wasn’t worth the $7 admission just to sit and eat lunch, so we agreed to come back another time when we could explore the park and turned around. A mile down the road was a turn-around area with a nice view and plenty of flat ground. After laying out a towel to sit on, we divvied up the contents of the cooler and got to talking about how it felt to have the sheep and goats eating out of our hands, and the lorikeets perching all over us. We watched a couple as they successfully drove their SUV across a gully and up the other side toward us, taking the shortcut out of the park instead of navigating back to the gatehouse. We congratulated them on their maneuver before packing up our makeshift picnic and heading back to town.
Our last stop of the day was running a couple errands, the last of which was a stop at Goodwill. Zibby needed some sweaters, as it’s colder here than she packed for, and I bought a few books to read out on the veranda. We finally got home around 6, made a quick dinner of leftovers, and settled into the couch for a little rest after our fun-filled day. I hope everything is going well back home. Take care!