Monkey Island at Amazona Zoo is the home to the squirrel monkeys. As the name suggests it’s a little island in the main lake [well, pond] inhabited by the squirrel monkeys. Access is by means of submerged RSJ’s allowing you to easily wade across the water whilst stopping the monkeys from doing the same. Unfortunately for me the boots I borrowed had a large split in them so I ended up with a very wet foot. Since I was carrying roughly 5 grands worth of camera equipment at the time I wasn’t going to rush and just had to accept that the boot was going to rapidly fill with water.

The monkeys have a number of ropes and trees to play on and they are tame enough that you can hand feed them, although they do sometimes bite when they get a little over enthusiastic. I’ve only spent a few minutes on the island as I still need to sort out some boots, but the monkeys are so photogenic you can’t fail to get good pictures.  One day I’ll spend an entire day camped out there armed with an array of lenses and several bags of grapes.

All images in this post can be found at images from… under the squirrel monkeys gallery in the cromer zoo section.

It’s no secret that I love big cats (this will become very apparent as I slowly managed to upload my backlog of photos up to the web). While my personal favorites will always be snow leopards it’s got to be said that jaguars also rate highly on my list. Luckily for me Amazona Zoo has two jaguars, Indiana and Troy, who inhabit a brilliant enclosure with loads of grass which leads to great colours in the background.

The jag’s haven’t been at the zoo as long as the pumas so I’ve had much less of a chance to photograph them (I’ve spent no more than 4 hours with them). With the zoo also being open to the public now it’s also harder for me to get the access and spend the large chunks of time with the animals. Still, in the time I have had with them I’ve managed to get these two shots, one of which is possibly one of the best photographs I’ve ever taken.

All images in this post can be found at images from… under the jaguars gallery in the cromer zoo section.

It’s got to be said, rhea are spectacularly stupid birds. This is most apparent when they are drinking. They snap at the water in what looks to be a highly ineffecient method of drinking and end up drenching thier heads. They will then shake their head to remove the excess water and, in the case of the rhea at Amazona Zoo proceed to bash thier heads against the fence because they haven’t moved far enough away. Of course nothing can beat the fact that one of the 4 that are at Amazona decided to just keel over and die on the opening day in front of a, thankfully very understanding, public.

Being a new enclosure the plant life, such that there is, hasn’t really had time to establish so the birds do, unfortunately, have rather a bland background to photograph against. Grey bird on brown background isn’t the best of combinations but hopefully the ones I’ve got aren’t too bad. I’ve also been trying some interesting shots with flash leaving the background completely black but I’ve yet to have a good one of those come out yet. Perhaps next weekend.

All images in this post can be found at images from… under the rhea gallery in the cromer zoo section.