Some Sad News, and Some Happy News, About Not-So-Wild Wildlife

I just discovered that the baby howler monkey at the National Zoo died on Sunday—this following the death, a few weeks earlier, of the baby panda.

Unlike the panda baby, who lived less than a week, Loki the little howler monkey was seven months old and, for those who had actually seen her at the zoo, already seemed like a healthy and permanent resident.

We could talk about this in the context of zoo conditions, the artificiality of these habitats, how they mess with animals’ behaviors and physiologies and so on, and I’m sure those can play a role. On the other hand, survivorship of wild animals is not particularly high, either.

Mainly I’m just sad that a fellow creature I had gotten to like, however superficially, died before she could even finish her first year.

On the happy side, a good friend just sent me the link to this New York Times article--news that will be especially exciting to people living in NYC and that comes with maybe the best photo ever:

A Fat, Mustachioed Orphan Finds a Home

It's something guaranteed to cheer almost anyone up. And we all need that.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Prism Break

The first kind of photography I learned to do all the way through, from taking the photos to developing the film to printing the pictures, was black-and-white photography, and for a while in college, when I had regular access to darkrooms, I was—maybe not obsessed—but certainly very taken by it. When I got into digital photography I felt I had to relearn how to use color in compositions.

Now I’m relearning how great it can be to leave color out.

I’d forgotten how much fun black-and-white photography is. I’d forgotten too how it lets you focus on texture and shape and portraiture and drama in a way that can occasionally get cluttered up by color.

For example, when photographing the howler monkey with her new(ish) baby, the absence of color helps me better frame their tender moments.

The absence of color makes the movements of the giant Pacific octopus, Pandora, as startling, sinuous, and striking as they are in real life.

It lets me enjoy the silky, liquid texture of a poison-dart frog without being distracted by its brilliant color.

I wish I could be more articulate, or more profound, but far more talented photographers than I have already done so. Suffice to say that it’s always nice to be reminded, yet again, that there are an infinite number of ways of seeing the world.

I recognize that not everyone responds to darkroom lights and fixative fumes as if they were memory- and perception-inducing madeleines. But have there been news ways in which you too have discovered the natural world?

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

In Appreciation After a Few Poor Nights

Another author said it first, far better than I could:

Sonnet To Sleep

O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes.
Or wait the Amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still hoards
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my soul.

- John Keats

{A note: I do write all text, unless otherwise indicated, and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Humans Have No Sense of Self-Preservation

I have a cold, which means I’ve spent the last two days with this expression:

[a female howler monkey who does not,
to my knowledge, have a cold]

I’ve also been feeling less than energetic. But since I felt a bit better late this afternoon, and since the day was so beautiful, I thought I’d walk over to one of the benches in the zoo and sit in the sun, healing myself with a nice dose of late-day vitamin D. And I brought my camera with me because, well, I was going to the zoo.

As it turned out, I had to walk around for a while to find a nice patch of sun in an area that wasn’t too crowded, and on my way I had various adventures, including nearly losing my notebook forever to the area surrounding the peccary enclosure. (Luckily, the little girl who accidentally knocked my notebook over the railing—while exclaiming, “Mommy, I see a pig!”—didn’t knock it into the enclosure itself, so I was able to retrieve it, only slightly damp from having fallen into the little man-made pond.)

The sun didn’t stay in one position for long, however, so after a brief basking and rather more time spent taking peccary pictures, I headed towards the back exit. But the “Great Cats” exhibit is on the way out, and I thought I’d just stop by. There, both tigers were pacing restlessly with a lean and hungry look.


Which brings me to the title of today’s post. The statement should come as no surprise, really, given our tendency to pollute and degrade the planet we depend on, given the fact that we design weapons of mass destruction and engage in warfare. None of this smacks of any great ability to maintain our species.

—But all of that relates to groups of people, and, as any biologist will tell you, natural selection acts on individuals, not on groups. That is to say, just because you blow up a bunch of members of your species or do any number of things that may be bad for Humans as a Whole, unless they’re also bad for you, engaging in those behaviors won’t necessarily result in your genes being removed from the gene pool and the next generation.

All well and good, but I am more and more convinced that, on average, humans as individuals also have little or no sense of self-preservation. I say this after having spent a great deal of time on numerous occasions photographing pacing tigers. As was quite clear from the photos in my earlier post, tigers are scary when they pace. And yet visitors to the zoo, by and large, display no fear.


I don’t mean that they’re just engaging in bravado, trying to be flippant in the face of something terrifying. No, I mean they are not afraid. There were a couple of exceptions today: a child who, while exiting the Great Cats area, told his parents, “I’m scared of the lions,” and a kid watching the tiger who asked his mother in alarm, “Why would they have it out in the open like that?” But otherwise, people had no qualms about roaring at the tigers, meowing at the tigers, whistling at the tigers, or making—well, I guess I’d have to call them cat-calls, all extremely provoking.

[wouldn't you love to be
the tiger's keeper?]

Yes, I do understand that the tigers are in enclosures that are designed to prevent their escape, and that it is highly unlikely that anybody watching them will be mauled to death. That’s not the point. There are certain images and sounds that humans appear to be born fearing; I haven’t looked into the research on this, but I think snakes may be in there, and certain color patterns. You would think giant felines with teeth the length of your hand would be one of those built-in fear producers, and I’d imagine that, at one point, they were. But we seem to be losing that innate terror, and we don’t seem to be supplementing it with a learned fear—and I don’t think that bodes well for us as a species. Regardless of whether or not any of us are eaten by tigers, it suggests we might be killed by stupidity.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}