Three days each month, I spend three hours at the zoo talking to the public about the large mammals. That currently includes three adult Asian elephants and a calf, a reticulated giraffe, and two Nile hippos. Our Masai giraffe and both our Asian rhinos have gone to other facilities for breeding, as part of the Species Survival Plan. (I met Mechi, our female rhino, up close before she left, and got to touch her. Her skin was warm and surprisingly soft at her knees and under the big folds.)

I get a lot of the same questions over and over: How old is the baby? Is that a boy or a girl? How long can it hold its breath? Why are they throwing dirt on themselves? More than one teenage girl has asked, Can I ride the elephant?

I don't get as many oddball questions and comments as I wish I did, although the four-year-old who assured me he could cut through rhinocerous skin with his chainsaw comes to mind, along with the teenagers who asked of the mother and son hippopotamus, "Do they, like, do stuff with each other?" (As a matter of fact, they would, like, do stuff with each other, if the 51-year-old mother were not on birth control: Depo-Provera shots every three months.)

Almost every time, I have a lengthy and memorable interaction with someone. There was the rural Virginia clan who asked me about rhinos for a good half an hour. Dutch family who had been on safari in African game parks recently, and the Nepalese boy who told me what wild rhinos sound like when they charge into each other. There was the woman who recommended I read Life of Pi—I bought it in Dulles Airport on the way to Mali, and I loved it.

Today, the last person I talked to was a boy of about eight, very curious about giraffes. He wondered if giraffes are the tallest animals in the world. (I told him they can grow up to 19 feet. I wasn't 100% certain this morning that they are the tallest animals; they are.) I showed him how the giraffe used its tongue to pull leaves off the branches, and he asked if it was the only African animal that does that (it was the only one I could think of that does that). I told him the giraffe's closest living relative is the deer, but it chews a cud like a cow, and sometimes, if you watch Malaika closely, you can see the cud travel up and down her long throat. Before long his parents were calling him away to the Giant Pandas. Before he left, he turned back to me and said politely, "Thank you for the facts, Robin."