Lemurs and Marsupials

I’ve not spoken of my archive much lately. Truth be told I’ve been ignoring it, but for the best reason: I’ve been taking enough photos lately that I’ve been able to be completely distracted by those and not have the time to delve into my archive to clear it all out.

Let’s turn back to the vaults for a bit, and return to a trip I took to Woburn Safari Park over 18 months ago, and last posted about back in January with a look at their monkeys.

At the end of that trip, which was an organised sanctioned photography trip, we were allowed into the lemur pens at feeding time to get up close and personal with the animals.

It hadn’t been a day of great weather; it had been a grey, rainy day, so the light was dull but at least pretty even. You can see the dullness in the images, which kind of undermines any hope I may have had in passing these off as creatures in their natural habitat, as opposed to a park in Bedfordshire.

They seemed to like hanging from the ropes in their pen. It might take a moment when you first see this image to figure out which end is which.

If there was any doubt as to how close we were able to get to these creatures, this photograph by my wife should give an indication. One of the small brown ones you’ll see shortly decided to defecate on my camera bag, something else it was able to survive with aplomb, albeit with a bit of a stain on it.

Normally at this sort of point in the post I’d talk about some sort of background of the animals or their biology. But I have no idea about lemurs. They look like a panda has mated with a chihuahua. The only thing I do know is this next animal is a lemur of the ring-tailed variety.

The ring-tailed lemur is, I think, the better known of the lemurs. He is a little more recognisable from this angle.

This chap was soon joined by a few of his friends.

I love this shot, but I wish I’d had the forethought (and available light) to shoot at a tighter aperture to get more of the faces in focus. This next shot works better in that regard as the lemurs had the decency to keep their heads in the same focal plane.

Also in the pens were some brown lemurs. There’s probably a more technical name for them, but I can’t remember.

One of these brown lemurs (lemurus browniae) was missing a front leg. It’s been long enough now that I can’t remember what they said happened to it.

There was also this thing which is, erm… no idea.

There was this funny thing too, but I can’t remember what that was called either.

Aha! I know what this next one is. It’s a chicken. Well, a rooster.

The title of this post also promised some marsupials. After our experience with the lemurs, which also marked the end of the formalities of the day, my wife and I wondered off to see some of the animals that weren’t on the photography field trip. One of them were these guys.

At the time I knew what these were. I think they’re wombats or wallabies or baby kangaroos or some such thing. They were great at making eye contact, that’s for sure.

Unless, of course, there was food involved.

Now this animal I do recognise. It’s an ostrich. Unless it’s an emu. Probably.

Someone should really come up with a book or a website that lists animals and what they are or something, because I really struggle with this sort of thing.

This isn’t my last post from this trip to Woburn. The next and final set of images from the trip will contain a more interesting and diverse bunch of animals, but amazingly mostly ones I’m able to recognise and name.

—————————————————————————————————————-

Related Posts:

The Big Cats of Woburn
The Hawk Conservancy
Monkeys