Brookfield Zoo continues my Springfield/Chicago trip with Tim Karas. The earlier posts about the trip are Springfield Part One, Springfield Part Two, Chicago Day One and Chicago Day Two. This is part of Chicago Day Three blog.
Due to my trip being cut short due to not staying in Milwaukee, we had to reschedule some things including when we were going to the zoo. It was originally going to be Thursday morning but because of our lunch plans with my brother, we moved the zoo excursion to Wednesday morning. Before the trip even started, I told Tim the only requirements I had for the trip was Springfield (done), day and evening shots of downtown Chicago (done) and of course, a zoo. I love animals and my favorite animal is tigers. When we were at the DC National Zoo in April, the tigers had already been taken in for the evening so I wanted to make sure I saw some this trip.
We bought our tickets and headed into the zoo. The first animal we came across was an amur leopard that was sleeping high in its enclosure. As I was getting ready to take a photo I noticed that my battery was low, mainly because the long exposure shots for the evening before and the fact that I hadn’t changed my battery yet during the trip so we headed back to the car to get a replacement battery. Before heading back, I stopped in the shop and picked up a small stuffed tiger and fox to add to my collection. As I was replacing the battery, I decided to grab an extra memory card because I only had about 500 photos left. We then headed back into the zoo.
The next stop was the lions which had a male and female. The lion enclosure had rock walls along three sides and on the left side is an alcove that has a window. You pass the window when heading to the main part. As we were taking photos of the two lions, the male lion got up, walked over to the alcove and roared several times. The people at the window had a front row seat. We, however, were at the main part of the enclosure so all we could see was his back end. At one point, the lioness looked over at him with the "oh will you shut up" look on her face.
Next up was the tiger enclosure. Good news there was an Amur Tiger (aka Siberian Tiger) in the enclosure. The bad news, however, was he/she was sleeping the entire time we were standing there taking photos. That didn’t stop me from taking many photos though.
It was a good thing that I brought that extra memory card because sure enough after MANY photos of the gorillas (there were babies), my card ran out of space while shooting the grizzly and polar bears. We also saw and got photos of snow leopards, rhinos, giraffes and kangaroos. I felt sorry for the tiger, polar bear and snow leopards, it was very hot the day when we were there and they aren’t used to high temps, they are used to much colder climates.
Story Continues in Chicago Day Three