Chester Zoo

Black jags and more

 March 5th 2013

I was very young when I first visited Chester Zoo with my Uncle Jack and my cousin Rachel. I guess it was around 1959. I can remember studying the zoo map when I got back home and carefully checking that I had seen everything: I was quite upset that I could remember seeing the buffaloes, but I hadn’t seen the buffet! My mother had to explain to explain to me what the Buffet was.

The zoo has expanded greatly since those days; a few of the buildings from that time remain, but they have all been modernised and many new ones have been built and indeed rebuilt. There is no doubt that Chester is now the best all-round zoo in the UK and I know that the zoo’s staff are determined that it will continue to be so.

As I had only made one short visit previously in 2013, I made sure that I had a full day on March 5th. I took the same kit as I used at Paignton, but I just used the 105mm macro and the 500mm without the coverter. The weather was good and the zoo was fairly quiet, although there were a few school parties as it was a Tuesday (I usually visit Chester at weekends, although the zoo is busier I often meet friends who are also regular visitors, plus the traffic is easier).

I was particularly keen to see some of the new arrivals, but my first decent photos were of 'Pele', the old male black jaguar. He has been allowed to use the outdoor waterfall enclosure of the jaguar house for a while now, and I think he looks very well on it. This is my favourite shot from a sequence taken with my 105mm lens as he walked around the enclosure. I like the angle of the light.

 

The other jaguar enclosure now holds a young pair of jags who have arrived this year. I saw them both for the first time, but they didn’t pose for me. I wandered around the zoo, but I didn’t really get any worthwhile photos until I reached the Tsavo aviary, where I paused for my packed lunch. It is supposed to be an ‘immersion exhibit’ making you feel that you are in Africa, but Chester in March isn’t warm enough to be convincing. Still the birds looked well and I used the 500mm to shoot this nice pose of a blacksmith plover.

I was delighted to get my first view of 'Tafari', the female okapi born last November. I was particularly pleased to see her as she is the zoo's first okapi calf and I had seen her parents attempting to mate in 2011. I particularly like the colour and texture of the coat of an okapi and I think that the contre jour lighting shows this well, I don’t particularly like the fussy background and I had to clone out a yellowish spot which was very distracting, but the bonus of that amazing tongue adds another element. I took several shots in the sequence, but this is the only one where the tongue is sharp.

This is the perhaps the point to say that I think that a good test of an animal photo is to ask if it shows you something new about the animal. Does this image pass the test?

Afternoon sunshine sometimes makes it possible to get good shots of the free-flying birds in the tropical house with a long lens. I was pleased to get this shot of a Madagascar red fody from the balcony, although the colour balance was tricky and I’m not absolutely sure I have the colours quite right here. This little guy does have garish red plumage, but perhaps this is a mite too garish.

Back at the Jag house, I managed to shoot the new young female 'Goshi', who is a black jaguar like 'Pele' (the zoo’s other two jags are normally coloured). This outdoor enclosure has a fence of very thick chain link and hot wires (the Curator of Mammals says you could keep a T. rex in there). So you have to work hard to get a clear image. I used my 500mm lens and increased the shutter speed to keep the aperture at f/4.5 to reduce depth of field and get the wire well out of focus. I also plunged my monopod into the thick border of spiny Berberis between the standoff barrier and the fence to get the front element closer to the wire (while still staying safe of course). I also picked a dark coloured area of wire to shoot through. Each of these precautions help technically, but you also need a proper pose to make the picture complete. I am satisfied with this one.

As it was getting towards closing time, I fitted the 105mm again for the walk back to the entrance, which was fortunate because the hyacinthine macaws were in their flight: this breeding pair can be quite secretive. One posed in front of the window and I took my chance.

 
 I hope it won't be too long before I have another day at Chester.

Leighton Moss

A nice day's birdwatching, but no rarities

28th February 2013

 

Leighton Moss is an RSPB reserve famous for marsh harriers, bitterns, bearded tits and otters. I didn’t see any of them on the 28th of February, but the light was good and I had a productive day.

I always start my visits at the Morecambe Bay hides, which are little way from the main reserve, because they have the best light early in the morning. Unfortunately there weren’t many birds on the pools. I did get nice views of a charm of goldfinches feeding in alders beside the path and of a crow posed in a hawthorn tree. I tried to photograph both: the dappled light in the alders didn’t work, but the crow was down sun and I liked the colours of the lichens and twisted twiggy branches.

Crows don’t attract much attention from birdwatchers and they often get a bad press, but I admire their agility in flight, their adaptability and their intelligence.

The main part of the reserve is the largest reedbed in northern England. There is a public footpath on a causeway across the reeds and the Public hide looks north from the middle of causeway, but there was little in view when I looked in. At the end of the causeway there is a path for RSPB members leading north to the Lower hide. This path runs along the edge of the reserve, between a strip of woodland beside the reeds and rough pastures. A pair of song thrushes was searching the grassland. I had to wait for them to come close to the fence, and to choose poses where tufts of grass didn’t spoil the view and the angle of the light did not create awkward shadows (although I did a little dodging in Photoshop on the second image below). I couldn’t do anything about the way that the thrushes’ activities caused damp bits of grass to stick to their heads and beaks.

At the Lower hide, the most prominent birds were some teal resting at the edge of the water just in front of the hide. Most of them swam off eventually, but a few started dabbling in the marshy ground. One drake came very close to the hide, so I got a few shots – focus was tricky and the colours on the drake’s head changed with every movement, but I like this one.

Snipe are tricky birds to photograph. They live among clumps of sedge and grass, which always seem to be in the way; they can freeze, immediately becoming almost invisible and when they do move, they can be jerky and unpredictable making panning and focus difficult. There were about eight feeding close to Lilian’s hide when I arrived there after lunch, but I got rather frustrated by them. Fortunately one of them decided to be even less predictable by going for a swim, which I had never seen before. In retrospect, I wish I had set a slightly faster shutter speed, but I was pleased to get an adequate shot.

On the path through the woods towards the Griesdale hide I spotted a brambling in company with a few chaffinches. I knew I couldn’t get a proper photograph in the thicket, but I wanted a record shot. There has been some discussion on The Online Photographer blog* about record shots. For me a record shot is a shot taken simply as a record of something I have seen. Sometimes it’s the first step to a better photo, if you can wait or move or find another way to improve on it, but sometimes you just have to be satisfied with a record. Just to illustrate what I mean, here is one of these shots of the brambling – it has just been cropped to the same proportions and reduced to the same size as the others and converted to jpg format without any other processing. 

This photo wins no points for technical merit or artistic impression; but it clearly records a brambling.

The day ended in frustration, as I spent a long time watching a group of red deer stags in the distance from the Tim Jackson hide. Most had shed their antlers, but the biggest stag still had a fine set, however he sat in the reeds and only stood up when he was behind two others. I got no decent photos of them.

* Highly Recommended
a thoughtful blog about the artistic side of photography http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com

 

Paignton Zoo

 My first full zoo photography day of 2013

I like zoos, provided that they are good zoos. I enjoy watching interesting animals and I like the chance to photograph them. Zoo photography is a good deal easier than photography of truly wild animals, but many of the skills are the same, so a zoo visit provides excellent practice. When I get a new piece of photographic kit, I take it to a zoo to get plenty of opportunities to learn how to use it effectively.

I like Paignton Zoo: it has some of my favourite animals and it generally does things the right way. Most of the enclosures are attractive and the zoo is a pleasant place to visit (unless you let the herring gulls see your packed lunch).

My first stops are usually Reptile Tropics and the Desert House. On the 17th of February, the hooded parakeets in the Desert House caught attention. The male’s colours of black, vivid cyan and bright yellow ought to clash horribly – but actually they combine wonderfully well. He was feeding one of the hens and she was inspecting nest boxes, which was a good sign. The Desert House is large and the hoodeds are fairly small, so I chose to add my 1.4x converter to my 500 mm lens as the light was good. I needed patience to get a really good opportunity.

I find that this 700 mm lens combination is usually too long for zoo work, but an unfamiliar view can be stimulating and I thought it might work well at the Ape Centre. Gorillas are my favourite zoo animals and orang utans are not far behind. I am not too fond of the house, but the outdoor enclosures are very good; they are effectively islands in the bottom of a small valley, from the ape’s point of view they are spacious and well vegetated. Visitors can usually see the animals doing interesting things, but only from a few vantage points. I spotted Chinta, the oldest female orang, on her favourite perch which was just right for my long lens.

Chinta is an unsociable animal, which is quite normal for an adult orang. She is usually kept on her own, although I hope that she will soon be able to mate with Demo, the zoo’s young male orang. As I watched she felt the need for a snack and clambered down to find a little something. I quickly moved back down the pathway to get a clear view of the whole tree while she chose a twiggy branch with tender bark.

Some of the gorillas came outside for a lunchtime scatter feed, so I moved to the viewing point between the islands. I think it was N’Dowe who decided to sit in the sun. After eating a couple of onions, he decided to practise his chest-beating display. I had never managed to photograph this display before, it is unpredictable because the its impact is mainly due to its surprise quality. N’Dowe did take me by surprise first off, but I could see he was working himself up again (as a chimp might do before displaying) and I increased the shutter speed and watched him carefully through the viewfinder. This is the climax of his third attempt.

After visiting the bird section, I replaced my long lens with my 105 mm macro (the only other lens I had with me). As I headed back towards the entrance, a crested seriema posed in a patch of sunlight in the Brook Side Aviary: too good an opportunity to miss, with no waiting or problems with viewpoints.

Back at Reptile Tropics, the reptiles were not co-operative, but I happened to arrive just as the birds were fed. This emerald starling posed beautifully, even hiding the ring on its left leg behind its perch (how good is that?).

In the afternoons at Paignton I generally check out my favourite birds and small mammals. The kusimanses and tenrecs were invisible and the parrots were not showing much better. I don’t normally bother with the Crocodile Swamp, my least favourite exhibit, but there had been some correspondence on the ZooChat website about the new false gharial, so I took a look. It wasn’t posing properly either. Fortunately the old short-beaked echidna didn’t let me down, he was having a constitutional in his pen. I took a lot of shots, trying to catch him as he entered a patch of sunlight.

I am always amused by other visitors’ reactions to the echidna. The commonest comment is ‘It’s a porcupine!’ I often point to the sign or tell them that it’s the only one in the country, sometimes I add that echidnas lay eggs. I haven’t yet said that a hatchling echidna is called a puggle – that would be going too far.

I retraced my steps and saw that the false gharial had moved. The best view was through a tiny, dirty window behind the pool. I didn’t expect much, but it’s amazing what can be done with Capture NX2 and Photoshop.