Zoo Extras

In my last entry I didn't mean that river otters couldn't/didn't swim on their backs.  My problem photographing them was their speed.  These swift, sleekly supple swimmers can corkscrew through water, easily outdoing human swimmers' choreography, their speed boiling up or splashing water from their strength.  Their powerful back stroke with watery effects is illustrated here.  Easy to understand why the group noun is a romp of otters (like a pack of dogs, a parliament of owls, a murder of crows, a pride of lions).

I had thought in the Zoo Afternoon entry that I didn't have any decent shots of our white tigers, all from our well-known sire, Rajah (Sanskrit for "King").  Most of the ones I saw were too agitated by feeding time to stay still.  But I do have two that aren't bad.

And not all penguins are inside our aquarium.  Besides the little blues outside the aquarium entrance in good weather, the giraffes farther south have company with a colony of little black-footed penguins.  Seeing this group near the giraffes' entrance--two giraffes were actually outside in the background before cropping--I wondered if there was a penguin equivalent of having all your ducks in a row.