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.