Fox

Welcome to the National Zoo, Fox.

I’m so confused. Just the other day, I was at my home in Hayden Valley at Yellowstone National Park. Now I’m suddenly in a cage with a bunch of humans staring at me! I was just roaming around in my territory when I heard humans coming near. Naturally, I tried to avoid them using my maneuvering skills. But there were too many of them and I soon found myself captured. I knew those humans would be a problem ever since I started to see them frequently back in the 1870s. And now look where I am, only 30 years later! In a cage, not even in Yellowstone!



One day I was sitting in my cage and a little slip of paper got blown into my enclosure. It must have been a copy of some sort of letter written by the humans. I went over and read it before the wind blew it away again. It was from a man named Samuel P. Langley to a man named Alexander Graham Bell. Here’s a shot of the letter:



The Zoo is sending raccoons to JAPAN?! Oh no..it says relations between the Zoo and the Japanese Gardens are going well…I hope they don’t decide to start shipping other animals to Japan too! I don’t know what I would do if they took me. The trip from Yellowstone to the Zoo was already super bumpy and uncomfortable, especially as I was confined to a tiny cage that I could barely move in. Imagine going from here to JAPAN! I can’t let that happen to me! I better try and keep up to date with what the Zoo is thinking…

There’s a man that I keep seeing almost everyday. The humans all call him Ostend. Frederick Law Olmsted. He's the architect for this Zoo. Apparently he made around 51 plans for the landscaping of this park. Can you believe that? All of his plans say that this is an exhibit for animals and a refuge for hurt animals. So that's what this is. Well, I'm not hurt. So I guess I'm an exhibit for all the humans to see. People call Olmsted the founder of lanscape architecture. He was a pretty big guy around those times. He did a lot of Gilded Age architecture, especially designing buildings in the World's Colombian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World Fair. I heard a lot of talk about the World Fair. They're actually planning to have a zoo there, in addition to a bunch of other exhibitions like Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

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