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.