No, we didn’t go back to the zoo, but I did get distracted by so many other photo ops we were lucky enough to have in a short period of time and missed some fun animals. I showed you the orangutans, because they usually make up half the shots I take at the zoo. But there were other notable creatures to see.
Imagine my surprise to see a white spoonbill. A Eurasian spoonbill, who was’t the best at posing for a picture.He did better here, posing with a scarlet ibis. We see ibis everywhere here, but not this scarlet variety. Their coloring comes from the crustaceans which they eat in tropical South America and the Caribbean.And this is a shoebill stork, who stood close enough to the front of the enclosure that it was hard to get a picture of his whole, 5 foot tall self! Somehow he seemed bigger than the other birds we see that are almost as tall as he was. But he has a sturdier build, and he looks so much bigger. They are from the swamps of eastern tropical Africa where they eat big fish, like lungfish, eels, and catfish. As well as Nile monitor lizards, snakes, and baby crocodiles. Another odd trait is that they poop on their own legs. It cools them off. They couldn’t print it if it wasn’t true, right?The sign said shoe billed heron, but when I googled that it just brought me to the big shoebills.I was shooting through the same sort of fencing that you see in the background here, but the camera can focus on the owls and ignore the fencing, at least some of the time. Barred owls.We finally saw the binturong. He came to the zoo and took over the enclosure where the clouded leopard used to drape himself over a big branch and allow for all of us to take great pictures of him. So we looked at this guy as an interloper, except that we hardly looked at him at all because he wasn’t usually visible. Until I lightened my picture quite a bit in Lightroom you couldn’t really see him in this picture either. They live in the trees, climbing well but not fast, and eat everything. That’s what omnivore means, right?I shot these lorikeets through their enclosure netting also. They made one cute pose after another and I worried that I wouldn’t get decent pictures, but they turned out okay. Choosing which cute shot to use was the problem.Doesn’t this guy look happy? I don’t know why because he shares an enclosure with what appears to be a couple of needle-nosed alligators, but they seem to have come to a meeting of the minds.Just a hippo, um, make that an Asian rhino.This is a Schmidt’s red-tailed monkey. His tail is longer than he is. So cute with a nice yellow heart on it’s face.
There is no story to the duckling in the feature photo, it’s just cute! But it is being raised in the zoo. What a lucky duck!
Living on the Nature Coast of Florida provides constant photo ops, and I need an outlet to share what I see. And sometimes what I think...
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