I’m not going to lie: I am a seriously annoying person to go to the zoo with. I can stand around and take photos of animals forever, not to mention all the time I can spend trying to find the right combination of settings to shoot pictures through a fence or in a low-light environment. I’m not exactly a technical wizard. Still, it’s nice to have a few photos to show for it, and at least I can rest assured in the knowledge that, while my family may only occasionally tolerate me, at least the people of the Internet understand. Here are a few of the best photos from a recent trip to Utah’s Hogle Zoo. I hadn’t been to the zoo since I was just a wee bairn and I was delighted to find many of the exhibits updated and some fantastic-looking new sections under construction to open this summer.
Tigers: totally regal and stuff.
It’s sleepy-time in lemur-town.
This Pallas Cat was super-cute. It’s a Mongolian wildcat and apparently it likes to play hide and seek with the keepers and freak little kids out by trying to pounce on them through the windows. You go, Pallas Cat.
OMG WHAT BABY MONKEY. So cute, you guys, seriously. This is a Bolivian Grey Titi Monkey. Even its name sounds cute.
Speaking of Titi Monkeys, the adults are also freaking awesome-looking. And the males are the primary caregivers to the young, which is also fascinating. That’s pretty much my zoo-going default mode: I wander from one exhibit and one sign to another exclaiming, “That is FASCINATING!”
Here’s that tiger again, showing off his impressive teeth.
I got the feeling that this was possibly an evil giraffe. “I will eat all of the leaves on this tree. I will eat more leaves than I should… so that other giraffes may die. Mwahahah!”
Just in case you haven’t seen it, here’s Eddie Izzard’s bit on evil animals: EPICNESS.
Bat-eared fox? AWESOMESAUCE. I wish to snuggle it.
This is a spoonbill. I have really nothing witty to say about it.
This langur has the best hairdo ever seen on an animal. EVER. Both mohawk and muttonchops? You, sir langur, are truly a sir.
And in conclusion, here’s my favorite shot of the day: a little tamarin. I got a few nice shots of these guys because the light coming in through the windows in their exhibits caught beautifully on their golden fur. So cute, tamarins. So cute.
We had the good fortune to visit Hogle Zoo on a beautiful, cool spring day, and although there were about a million children there — and the bird show was cut short when the golden eagle went a little AWOL and couldn’t figure out how to get himself back down into the show area — we had a pretty awesome time. I can’t wait to go back to see the new exhibits when they open… but I’ll probably go alone, so nobody has to put up with my incessant photo-taking.
