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Peel Zoo

Back at the beginning of June, i resolved to do something about diversifying my photography sources beyond Caversham Wildlife Park and Perth Zoo. I thusly drove down to Pinjarra on WA Day to check out Peel Zoo.

Naturally, one of the photographs from that day got posted early by accident – the picture with the devils snuggling up. Peel Zoo is part of an effort to breed an insurance population of Tasmanian devils should Devil Facial Tumour Disease wipe out the current wild devil population as predicted within the next 20 years, and this makes Peel Zoo a particularly good place to visit if you like devils.

It’s also somewhere you can meet tame emus face to face and hand-feed them, which is a pretty rare activity in my experience. The huge walk-in aviary (covered in “enter at your own risk” warnings) is brilliant. Also anywhere that takes tame pythons out of their enclosure and lets them fall asleep on you is definitely OK by me – i had a carpet python and a black-headed python doze off while draped around my shoulders. (I didn’t get photos – i went alone and the black-headed python was partly wrapped around my camera; it took some minor extricating before it could be returned to its home. Silly python.)

Peel Zoo is well worth the hour and a bit journey out of Perth to discover for yourselves. There are animals down at Peel which you plain just can’t see at Perth Zoo or Caversham Wildlife Park, let alone getting up very close in some cases.

The next week and a bit of pictures, starting today and finishing on the 18th, are all from Peel Zoo. This is not to say that there are only nine animals worth seeing at Peel, just that only nine animals (ten if you count the devils) took a good enough photo to make the cut. Actually, only eight of the animals to come yielded a particularly good photo or photoset, but you’ll see why i made an exception in a couple of days.

And yes, the exception involves a quoll. Of course it does. Is the title of this blog not what it is?

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Journals

Coming up over the next month..

I have over a month of images queued as usual, with images taken from Perth Zoo and Caversham Wildlife Park. (I am considering diversifying my sources a bit from just those two places. Honest.)

Coming up in June you can expect sleepy woylies, quokkas out of focus, pampered bettongs, surprisingly large cuckoos, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAs, possums doing what possums do, quolls, bilbies who really like their food, evil lorikeets, tired wombats, quolls, curious perenties, echidnas, shirty owls, quolls, helpful parrots, kangaroos who just want to know why, shifty koalas, shiftier kookaburras and angelic emus. Also quolls. The photos will often be captioned with Interesting Facts and Tidbits, including a very small amount of local Indigenous culture but only what’s appropriate for a wadjala to mention – local Indigenous words for the subject of the photograph and links to further material from Noongar people themselves. There will be no tellings of Dreamtime/lore stories from me: not my culture, not my privilege.

Special events include Chuditch Week in the middle of June and right at the beginning of July i’ve scheduled something so cute it will give you all eye diabetes.

And to all the followers of this photo blog and the many likers/rebloggers of the photographs: thank you! It’s been lovely to have you along. 🙂

Categories
Australian Animals Photography

Recropped older photos

A couple of older photos have been better cropped now that i have found out how to do that while i’m colour-tweaking. They are:

Categories
Australian Animals Photography

I’ve just thrown a heap of pictures into the post queue and set them to publish one a day until 5 June. I hope you guys like bettongs.

The pictures were all taken at Caversham Wildlife Park on 12 May 2012 using a Canon DSLR with a 50mm prime lens, only using available light. (I don’t like hitting animals with a flash because i hate being hit with a flash myself, plus a lot of them are nocturnal which means they have sensitive eyesight.)

EDIT: Autoposting has been extended until 8 June with more material from my first DSLR-wielding visit. Yes, there are more bettongs.