A Quick Visit to Paignton

JUST A FEW SUBJECTS THIS TIME

25th June 2013

I didn't have a full day on my latest visit to Paignton, but I wanted to see the baby Bornean orang utan born to Mali on the 11th of April (two weeks after my previous visit).

Unfortunately Mali was on the large orang island in the morning and she spent the time so deep in the vegetation that I could hardly see her, let alone her daughter. Fortunately I was on the viewpoint when the keepers called her back to the house for a snack of fruit. She climbed up to the entrance door (which was locked so that another orang could use the indoor area). She sat and enjoyed her titbits between the plastic draught excluders, which gave me the opportunity for an extended sequence.

My original photos showed a lot of the plastic screens. I tried cropping to a square format, but I liked the facial expressions of both apes so much that I thought a pair of portrait crops might work better. This took a little more work in Photoshop, but I like the results.

You just have to love baby orangs! I am also very pleased that Mali is such a good mother.

My other subject was the old short-beaked echidna, the only monotreme in the UK. He was taking a constitutional before his afternoon feed. The dappled sunlight in his enclosure was very attractive, but a photographic nightmare. The old guy trundles around his enclosure on his habitual paths and it doesn't look as if he is moving fast: but any photos shot at less than 1/200 s are quite blurred, unless you can catch a rare still moment. Neither of these shots are perfect, but both show him quite well.

I just had time to catch the gorilla keeper's talk at 2.30pm. There were so many people around her that I couldn't use my camera. But I walked a few metres further and spotted my favourite gorilla waiting on one side in the shade. He was keeping out of trouble as he is the youngest male in the group.
Matadi is the great great grandson of Stefi and Achilla, the first gorillas to breed in Europe. I photographed them at Basel forty years ago. I have images of all the gorillas in Matadi's family tree since then, except for his late father Sekondi, who always disappeared when I had my camera. Matadi is now a well grown blackback and I don't think it will be too long before he is moved to a zoo where he can meet some females as he is not closely related to any other gorillas in the Studbook so his genes are important.

Principally Primates

Another day at Paignton Zoo

28th March 2013

 

Each time I visit a zoo I learn a bit more - it may be about the best time to see an animal or the best place to stand to view or photograph a particular enclosure. I try to remember each point for future visits, but I also keep my eyes open and look for fresh opportunities.
The Allen's swamp monkeys gave me an example. Their enclosure is roughly triangular and is bordered by streams and hotwire barriers, which are good for photography. The island has a large fallen tree trunk and a thick covering of low shrubs (I think it's an evergreen Cotoneaster) where the monkeys spend a lot of time foraging. As I walked up I saw that they were shut outside while a keeper was cleaning their house. The little female kept climbing on top of the tree truck, looking along the path and calling. She was at a nice distance for a shot with my 500mm lens except that I had to look directly into the sun, I had a look through the viewfinder and I saw that the small leaves of the shrubs reflecting the sunlight made an interesting background and the light passing through the long hairs around her head made a partial halo. A purely pictorial effect, but I liked it. The potential problems were catching her mouth open and giving the right exposure to show the details of her face. A quick trial shot and a histogram check showed that my Nikon's exposure was good for this contre-jour lighting, so then it just took patience to shoot a series as she repeatedly returned to her vantage point and called (until another keeper arrived with their feed).

The ability to check exposure and framing is one of the great advantages of digital photography: the photographer's term for this activity is one of my favourites, because looking at your images can be exciting if you happen to see one or two good ones so you naturally make "oo oo" noises, hence the name is chimping :) You just have to try to contain your excitement.

I avoid chimping, but I would be happy to gorilla if I could. My favourite subject 'Kumbuka' was out in spite of the cold. Now that he is a silverback, he has to kept on his own so that he can't challenge the dominant male 'Pertinax' or disturb the hierarchy of the blackback males. He has first use of the island in the morning, but he goes into his den for lunch and the other gorillas go outside in the afternoon. I may be wrong to use the present tense here as he may already have gone to Regents Park to lead London's gorilla group. He is a very handsome animal and he is genetically important as he and his half brother are the only surviving offspring of a wild-caught male, so it would be very welcome if he breeds with 'Effie' and 'Mujukuu'. For various reasons the last three males at ZSL have not been successful, so everyone hopes he will become a good group leader and eventually a father there.

I tried to get contre-jour shots of his breath condensing in the cold air, but it didn't show up well. The alternative was to shoot from the other side of the island with the sun behind me. This shot pleases me, I think because the angle of his head shows the height of his crest and it also allows the light from the sun (still quite low in the sky) to illuminate his eyes.

I think I realised subconsciously that it was primate portrait day. I was soon in Monkey Heights working on the white-faced saki monkeys, this is a subadult (only adult males have white faces). This was shot through very fine mesh, almost at the minimum focus distance for the 500mm. I love this lens because it is very sharp and because it simplifies the composition of the images, making them very direct.

I think this is 'Katya' a female cherry-crowned mangabey. The zoo has a nice group of these attractive monkeys with a newborn infant too. Unfortunately for some reason they have the habit of plucking the red hairs from their crowns, which really spoils their looks. 'Katya' is the only one who has escaped. I love her sweeping whiskers. Shot through green-painted, heavy-gauge wire - but I don't think you can tell from the image. It's a pity I clipped the tips of the hairs on her crown.

I couldn't pass by this grey-winged trumpeter. It had flown up to a perch and it was sunbathing with its wings spread. I managed to include a glimpse of the tuft of blue feathers on the breast of the bird - the only bright colour in its sombre plumage. I have tried to convince myself that I don't mind the tartan background (wire mesh, vegetation and sky) - without complete success.

This shot was a bit of an afterthought near the end of my visit after clouds had obscured the sun. The yellow-shouldered amazon is a real rara avis and I wanted a record shot. The framing was difficult as they were at the back of their aviary and I was shooting between their perches. It's far from brilliant, but I feel that the combination of the individual poses makes it a little more than a record.

Diffuse light from a cloudy sky suits some creatures. I had put the long lens away and just used the 105mm for this shot of a red panda which came quite close to pose. It's easy to overexpose the white face and lose highlight detail in bright sunlight, but this lighting worked nicely and the evergreens in the enclosure provide both foreground and background.

. . . and a little bonus

The ostrich and zebra paddock was very popular with wild birds. Apart from the inevitable herring gulls and wood pigeons, it also attracted magpies, a robin, blackbirds, a song thrush and a splendid pair of mistle thrushes. One of them came well within the range of my 500mm with hastily fitted 1.4x converter.

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.