UTAH: HOGLE ZOO

Salt Lake City has a zoo that is located only a mile or so from Jeff and Bei's place.  Geri and I had a free afternoon and paid a visit.  This is not a large zoo, but it does include most of the standard animals. In fairness, the zoo is undergoing major renovations and a significant portion of the grounds were inaccessible, though I think all of the animals were still viewable.

The zoo actually had a nice display of African elephants, and I took a relatively large number of shots of them.  Here are a few.  The first is rather unusual, as the elephant looks to be doing some sort of pole dance.

One of the elephants was facing us and was periodically displaying his/her ears, and I wanted to capture that.  This is the best I got.

Not great.

I also wanted to get as best I could a closeup of an elephant's eye.  Also not too great.

I would have liked to get a closer shot, but this shot is already pretty heavily cropped.  Got some eye lashes, though.

There were also primates, of course.

I liked that I isolated this second monkey from its background.  I didn't mind that it was facing away from me.

There were some new world monkeys inside a small mammal building that had very low lighting.  This shot was taken with the lens wide open and at an ISO of 2000.

Every zoo needs giraffes, and this one had a couple.  Although I took some full length shots, the best ones I got were closeups, as in the following.

The were also some big cats, including this snow leopard that appeared to be looking directly at the camera.

Here was the local tiger.

So why did I take just a closeup of his whiskers?  The truth was that the tiger was lying behind a barrier and this was the only portion that I had a clear shot of.  At least it was different.  Nice pink nose, too.

There was also a grizzly taking his siesta.  Again, I really couldn't get a clear shot, so I decided to concentrate on his paw.

Finally, there were a couple of bald eagles.  One was sleeping, but I  got a couple of nice shots of the other.

Taken with my Nikon D7000 with Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-6.3 lens.