Getting into the Spirit of the Season: Advertising!

[just itching to tell you my news...]

That’s right, the day you’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived: you can now own high-quality prints of flamingos feeding, orangutans brachiating, and cows pretending to be innocent—among others. Ever wanted to send a greeting card with a picture of a lemur on it? Ever wanted to send a Christmas card wishing your loved ones “Appy Owlidays”? Now you can!

I’ve gotten enough (positive) comments on my photos that it seemed time to make them available for purchase as prints or cards. So I’ve set up a “gallery,” a separate blog that shows all of the images that are available (entries are grouped by month). The blog is Beasts in a Populous City Gallery, http://BPCgallery.blogspot.com, and it can be accessed any time from the new top-tab, “Buy Prints and Cards.” I think that any details about the prints are already posted in that tab or on the Gallery site, but if you don’t find what you’re looking for there, just comment on this post with a question, and I’ll answer it.

Stay tuned for a less-commercially-inclined post tomorrow!

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

Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ll just moralize briefly about the fact that it’s always worth considering the plight of other species as well as our own on Thanksgiving, and thinking of what we can do to help them—be it giving money to a conservation group, planting more native wildflowers in spring, or being more careful with our resource consumption/waste disposal.

Okay, enough of that. Since Thanksgiving doesn’t have a specific visual theme (except eating), I’ll just post some images of zoo life in autumn:

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

Flamingo Friday: Frustration

or, Mallards Are Sabotaging My Photoshoot

It was the perfect day to get more pictures of flamingos browsing picturesquely in their pond; the sun was shining, the breeze was blowing--but not so much as to make the water’s surface too choppy--the flamingos were wading. But the flamingos were not the only birds in the pond. No; the flamingos were outnumbered—greatly outnumbered—by ducks.

I have nothing against wild birds enjoying the zoo’s habitats; on the contrary, I’m usually only too pleased to see how nicely landscaped and welcoming the zoo’s enclosures are. But I draw the line at scene-stealing waterfowl.

It’s not just that they were in the background--which they were; it’s not just that they often disrupted quite beautiful reflections with their unruly paddling--although they did that, too.

It’s more that, just as I had trained my lens, and waited, and was finally about to capture a good shot--a propitious combination of light, color, and flamingo position--something like this would happen:


Think it only happened once? Ha! Feast your eyes on these marvelously ruined photo opportunities:



I didn’t fault the ducklings; they got in the way, too, but they were just too cute to get mad at.


Nor did I fault the wood duck, just because, with what I admit is a small amount of bird-snobbery, I consider her less common, more novel, and therefore an acceptable subject of photographs in and of herself.

But the mallards…

They drove me to such a point that, more than once, I uttered a word that is not Zoo Friendly. Luckily, there were no children around (not that the kids themselves would care, but their parents would not be happy with me). Eventually, however, I foiled the fowls and managed to get some halfway decent shots after all:



But I could tell they were gloating.

[note how the lovely flamingo reflections are overshadowed
by this smugly preening mallard]