21/52 - Photo Project 2013

For the first time in awhile, I have 5 pretty decent candidates that are in a 'tie'.  I had a photographic week - more sneaking in some macro photo time, a trip to the zoo to visit zoo babies and an evening photo shoot on the Eads Bridge downtown in East St Louis.

It's a tie:

Which one shall be the winner?

Sorry, skyline... baby animals win every time!




You can't resist that face... I can't!

Zoo Babies!

My roommate and I went and visited the St. Louis Zoo, expressly to see Priya, our newest elephant on her public debut. She was born on April 26th - so she's not even one month old. She is so tiny and precious - especially in comparison to her mother... don't you agree?



     


And while we were there, we saw THREE other zoo babies!

A joey out of his/her pouch:



A baby zebra:



and a baby Bactrian camel:



whose family posed for a family portrait:



There's really nothing better than getting surprised by super-cute zoo animals. This is why I love the Zoo!

Easter Sunday at the St Louis Zoo

Zoo animals get enrichment from time to time - usually food or toys. Something that enhances the animal - behaviorally, environmentally, socially, psychologically, etc. The St. Louis Zoo made a whole Easter Sunday day of it - so, thematically, most enrichment were egg based (literally or figuratively). It was really enjoyable to watch some of the animals get their enrichment. I saw a few occurrences of it before just wandering around the zoo with a friend/fellow photographer.

One of my most favorite places in our zoo is Big Cat Country. We have Amur tigers and leopards, a panther (or is a jaguar?), two snow leopards, two pumas and a pride of lions. One male, one female and three female offspring, two of which I believe are twins.  I had a 'front row seat' to the lion enrichment. They were all lying about the delightfully warm day and as soon as they spotted their keeper, they were all on alert. She tossed in egg pinatas with cinnamon and some sort of wood fibers that they apparently love. It was thoroughly enjoyable to watch. Here's just a FEW of my faves from that visit:

            



And here are a few faves from the rest of the visit:

     


           

You can check out the rest here.

Fun at the Zoo in January

Unexpectedly -  St. Louis had a slightly warm turn in weather. Combined with sunshine and a day off, I decided to spend a morning at the Zoo. It was well-worthwhile. I wanted a good walk and a lot of the animals were feisty.

Like these kangaroos - for example. They're not playing peek-a-boo or hugging. They wrestle with their very short arms and then balance on their tails and kick the daylights out of the other. I wouldn't want to mess with one of them.

        

As much as it was scary, it was impressive. Then I moved to my favorite part of the Zoo, Big Cat Country.

There were two new pumas, and they were the only two not napping at the time. Puma was doing a McKayla Maroney impression:

While the other meditated:

The snow leopards were snoozing, and then grooming each other:

  

The lone Amur tiger, spent most of the time napping, but deigned to look up at me (sort of) after lots of patient waiting:

The lions were particularly interesting - it's a whole family - mom, dad, and 2-3 offspring or at least younger lions.

Two of the youngest were wrestling each other:

 

And Mom and Dad had a bit of a fight:

And I think the oldest walked away:

I also visited the "River Wild" where animals like the elephants live... an area I rarely get to because it is on the opposite side of the park than I usually go to - it's also the newer part.

These are just a few of the 80 or so that were keepers - with such feisty animals, it was really hard to pare down similar photos from the kangaroo fights or the lion wrestling matches. Check them out on my photo stream here.

Anastasia, Amur Leopard Cub

On Wednesday afternoon, I had the privilege of seeing Anastasia's public debut. Anastasia is a 3.5 month old Amur Leopard cub born at the St. Louis Zoo and Wednesday was her first major outing. She was incredibly adorable and her mom, Mona, was a charmer too. The neighboring pen held her dad, Erskine, but they had never met. I witnessed their first "meeting" through the wire of the cages - initially she was curious, then hissed because "mom, that's a BIG cat next door" but was later curious. Mona and Erskine hadn't seen each other in awhile and are quite taken with each other and were very chatty. As was mom with baby. Anastasia spent the beginning doing an Army-style crawl around the enclosure - everything was new to her - she'd only seen snow once before and would greet everything with an initial hiss. After awhile, she was bounding around, playing cutely with her mom and being a precocious little toddler by walking out on branches that her mom playfully knocked her off of.

I had a chance to chat with the Keeper, R, who was very accommodating and answered a lot of my questions. I found out about Ana's debut about 45 minutes before it happened via Facebook and I'm so glad that I bundled up and headed over there. Ana was super cute, her Keeper awesome and the parking attendant who saved me from using a parking pass by finding me a free spot (I rewarded her with pictures and stories of Ana on the way out) - it was all in all an afternoon well spent.

p.s. there are 97 pictures in this set, but I took almost 1100. It took me several days to pare down to these pics - I had to throw away so many bad ones (their wire enclosure makes auto-focus moot and they occasionally move pretty fast for manual focus) and just as many good ones that were similar to the ones remaining. I definitely overshot because I never knew which ones would truly be in focus. I hope you look at them all and more than just the few favorites posted here:

Catching Up/St Louis Zoo

Wow... it seems like it took forever to post about my 11 days in China. Whew, glad that is over. I've got some catching up to do.

Let's start with a trip to the St. Louis Zoo, one fine, crisp late November morning. It was a beautiful 50° day with blue skies and since those days are bound to be few and far between soon enough, I decided to take advantage.

I said hello to the bears:



and to the penguins:



whose habitat matched the temperature outside inside.

Saw another bear who was just sitting around, casually, like you do:



Aren't these leaves stunning? Proves that not everything cool at the zoo are animals:





My next stop was one of my favorites - Big Cat Country:

Two lions cuddled up together:



A napping snow leopard:



a beautiful tiger:



Who liked to show his teeth:



And sat in almost perfect light, but yet never looked up at me:



Lastly, I visited River's Edge, which I haven't been to since they created it. I saw a cheeatah:



Some pretty sun-lit plants:



And lastly, elephants:



I gave my parents an elephant for the holidays - sort of. I adopted an elephant at the Zoo on their behalf... I was so excited to give them the gift (an adoption certificate and a pretty plush elephant) and make them adoptive parents again. They loved it! (Whew!)