Flamingo Friday: Feathers Again

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.}

The Charisma Begins: Red Pandas (part one)

I don’t have a whole lot to say about red pandas (beyond what I already wrote in this post) except, “They’re so cute!” But then, since that’s sort of the reason for this entry, it’s not really a problem. I can say that they are not cooperative photo subjects; in some ways, they’re even worse than otters, for all that the otters are more frenetically active. Red pandas like to do things like curl up, ever so adorably, in trees, where branches and leaves obscure their fox-like features.


Or they like to walk through their enclosure, scent-marking it—all very admirable, I’m sure, but even at a slow pace, they climb up and down and behind things, making it very difficult to get a clear shot.


There have been lucky moments, however, and now that it’s late autumn and the trees are mainly bare of leaves, it’s much easier to get pictures that include these guys’ faces (there’s a male and a female). So enough of the narrative; enjoy the photos.

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

Wild Wildlife: Share the Fountains

A Quick Picture (or so)

Well, otters won out in the Charismatic Macrofauna vote, but I’ll have to post first about red pandas (the runners-up) anyway, since I learned some new things about small-clawed otters this past week, and it’ll take me a little while to write up a proper entry about them. So here are a couple of otter pictures (of one plunging for and playing with a pebble) to tide you over, and look forward to red pandas, and then more otters, in the near future.

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