Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?

The kids had Good Friday off of school - their only day off for Spring break because of all the snow make-up days - and the weather forecast was gorgeous, so we took a drive down to the Pittsburgh Zoo.  Once there we headed directly to the polar bear tunnel in hopes that the bears would be in the water.  And we were not disappointed, for not one, but two bears were in the water!  One of the zoo's males was frolicking in the water with a female that is visiting from another zoo in hopes of making baby polar bears.  :)  Needless to say my camera and I had a field day!

The male kept climbing out of the water and jumping back in on the female.  They were so fun to watch!

I wanted to get some photos of the kids watching the bears but I had a tricky time because I had only brought my 50mm and my big zoom.  I opted to leave my 24-70 at home since it is so heavy and I didn't want my neck to hurt after hauling around a bunch of lenses all day.  Does anyone else do that?  Debate about which lenses to take?  Turns out we rented a wagon for our stuff and I could have brought my favorite lens after all since I didn't carry my backpack much at all.  Oh well.

These last ones are of just the female.  The male must have decided he was done swimming, but the female was having a blast in the water.

We must have spent about 30 minutes in the polar bear tunnel before moving on.  A certain someone was getting whiny.  :)

I didn't take many other pictures.  One - because you can only have so many pictures of the same animals doing the same things.  And two - it was pretty crowded so photo ops were sometimes tricky.

This peacock was hanging around above the polar bear tunnel.  My boys kept trying to pet him.  Nick wanted to pluck one of his tail feathers.  Boys!  {sigh}

We headed into the aquarium next.  At least the bottom part.  
I tortured my kids by making them have their picture taken with me in one of the huge fish tanks.  :)

We had a great day at the zoo!

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