As I said earlier, most of the shots I took at the Nashville Zoo have never been post-processed. I took at least hundreds, and probably thousands. I’m sharing here the ones that I deemed at the time to be “good enough” for the public to see.
Every zoo has elephants. Here’s my elephant shot that (in my imagination) looks most like them in the wild: dusting themselves.
It seems that every zoo also has meerkats. To me, they aren’t that remarkable of an animal, but I’ve noticed that children are fascinated by them. Here’s my best meerkat shot, of one standing sentry:
Primates:
I really don’t even know what Guenons are, but they sure get some cute expressions on their face.
Alligators:
And finally, a scene that unfolded before me that I still laugh about to this day. The zoo had three young giraffes, a male and two females, that were quite young. Indeed, they hadn’t entered puberty yet — but they were about to.
The male was ready to mate before the females were. But one of them must have been putting out some scent, because the male got excited and was determined to mate with her. But she wasn’t (yet) in the mood.
The male chased her all around the enclosure, alternating between giving loving caresses neck-to-neck and trying to mount her.
OK, to an old farm boy, none of this is shocking or salacious in any way, but Nashville is a town of city people who think they’re all country. It is also “the buckle of the Bible Belt” (their words).
I wish I had taken an audio recording of the comments from the crowd that had gathered. Young teen girls were trying to talk to the male, saying “She’s just not that into you” while teenaged boys were clapping and cheering every time he got close to “scoring.” And mothers were expressing words of disgust that their children were seeing any of this!
City people. Farm kids see this all the time.
Here’s a shot I got of one of his attempts:
I’ll close with a touching scene I saw some years after leaving Nashville, in another zoo.
The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo (near Colorado Springs) had a Sarus Crane at the time I visited there. It was late, the place was about to close, and I was photographing it when a young zookeeper walked out into its pen, talking to it.
She put one hand on each side of the bird, talking to it (“It’s time to go in now”) and proceeding to walk it to its barn. The bird complied without complaint. It was just such a sweet scene, seeing this nice human talking to the bird as she walked it into its nighttime quarters.
I think about this every time I move some object (such as a certain heater I have) by putting one hand on each side of it.
Love these photos! That fearsome close-up of the alligator is the best I have ever seen of these legendary beasts. The funny giraffe story aside, that rope in the upper pic that Guenon was sitting on had, for just a millisecond, looked mighty impressive!
Great work all along. I still have to get caught up to your latest posts. When I read these, I spend a long time going over each detail looking for the finer things in the background whilst studying your composition of each shot.