Glorious autumn weekend of mid-20s weather drew me down to the Melbourne Zoo. I only took one lens with me, an old FA 100-300 I had from my Pentax Z1 days 15 years ago. I don't like lugging all my gear on zoo visits as it gets so crowded on weekends.
First stop as the zoo opened was the meerkats, which are very absorbing creatures and are easy to spend a lot of time watching. So much so that Melbourne Zoo has two meerkat exhibits. They're quite photogenic creatures, too; this wasn't the best shot but I did think it was one of the cutest!
Then a visit to genuine cats. The lions are a roll of the dice; typically they will be just lying around in the sun, head lolling on the ground, but today at least a one was having a look around.
Elephants are usually entertaining and for any Melbournites their "Meet the Keeper" segment is one that should not be missed, as the elephants are ex-working animals from Thailand so are happy to put on a 'show' while they are exercised and checked for injuries. The logs are scattered around so their trunks get a workout too.
This peacock was so tame that I had to keep backing away from it to get the shot with a 100 mm (35 mm equiv. about 150 mm I guess). Dang, where was my Sigma 50 mm...! (Sorry about the abysmal crop; didn't notice the line at the top until I looked at the post)
And a plain old blackbird of some sort that was having so much fun in a waterfall, I couldn't resist trying to capture the patterns of light it was making with the water drops. No, it only has one beak, that was 1/30 sec giving it
The Exorcist look.
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