Monday, January 14, 2008

Nutria at the Park

Alexandra and I spent some time at the park yesterday, which has become our weekend tradition lately. We went to a different park - one that has a duck pond with nutria in it. It was getting dark and I didn't have my new camera, so the photos weren't turning out very well. I took over 30 photos and this was the only one really in focus.


I enjoyed talking to a lady who used to own 2 of the ducks at the pond. She knew a lot about the animals in the park. She showed us where the nutria's nest was and told us that the mamma had 8 babies in the summer and had recently had another litter. We saw many of the summer babies and we saw the mamma several times - the lady had said the mamma hadn't really been coming out since having her babies.
The lady's husband had hand-fed these nutria earlier that day. They were trying to explain to Alexandra how to get them to eat from her hand. I told Alexandra "no, way!" Have you ever seen the teeth on a nutria? If you enlarge this photo, you should be able to see part of its orange teeth. Pretty scary looking!

5 comments:

live4evermom said...

You know, I've heard of the Nutria but never actually have seen one. It sure doesn't look like something I would keep as a pet.

live4evermom said...

check out my tagboard on my blog

Rhonda said...

Living in Louisiana, I see lots of Nutrias. I would never feed them though. Those teeth are horribly sharp and I would never get close enough to one to even try to feed it. Sorry your camera doesn't do well in low lighting. That is exactly why I was looking for another camera. I have lost so many pictures when trying to take photos at night. It sounded like a nice day for y'all and I am sure that Alexandra enjoyed all the information about the Nutria and her babies.

Robin said...

I'm gonna show my ignorance here.... But I've never even heard of nutria. It looks like a little beaver to me. I couldn't get the picture to enlarge, but if he's in the beaver family, I don't need to. If they can chomp through a tree, my kid's hands are going nowhere near that mouth! You are smart.

Heidi said...

I've never heard of a nutria either!
Thanks for sharing.

Related Posts with Thumbnails