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.

I wouldn’t normally rate zoos as a great source of photographs, many of the animals are behind fences, there are standoff barriers keeping you back and you’re often only spending a little amount of time with each animal. I’m lucky in so far as my step father is curator of a new zoo in Cromer meaning I get unprecedented access to the animals, early access to the zoo (so very few people around) and the house is in the zoo grounds allowing me spend as much time as I like with each animal and photograph them at the best times of day.

My primary focus was the two pumas that had just arrived. Called pinky and blacky (so called because of the colour of their noses) I spent many hours rattling off shots of these two. Pinky seemed to have settled in very well and spent most of the time on top of one of the large trees that had been put in the enclosure simply watching the world go by. Blacky, on the other hand, had not settled at all.

Despite not being able to go into the enclosure with the cats (they’re far too dangerous) I was able to get up close to the enclosure fence and get some pretty good shots. Even with a nice wide aperture blurring the fence out actually getting decent shots was hard so being able to spend the time with them to get the best poses was a godsend.

Even getting into the enclosures didn’t always help with getting rid of the fences. I spent over 3 hours lying in the aguti enclosure waiting for the perfect shot. Only one of them would come out while I was in there and even then he kept to the edges of the enclosure. By picking some creative angles I was able to get a few shots where it wasn’t apparent that the animal was captive

Despite going for the pumas I actually spent the most time with the marmosets. My usual cry when doing wildlife photography is ‘bigger lens’ and I do most of it with my 70-200, often with a 2x teleconverter. The marmosets, on the other hand, were so inquisitive that I ended up using my 24-70 lens and even my 100mm macro since it’s the only thing that would focus at the kind of distances I was having to deal with. The biggest problem I had was framing the shots before the darted off to another branch as they move incredibly fast. Eventually the monkeys got so comfortable with me around that they were trying to grab the camera and were putting their heads right into the lens hood to check out their reflections.

Unfortunately I lost a day and a half’s shooting as my camera decided to break down mid way through my holiday and I hadn’t brought my spare body. I did manage to get a couple of shots of some of the other animals but I’ll have to go up another time when my camera has been repaired. Hopefully then the rest of the animals will have arrived.

All images in this post can be found at images from… under the pumas, marmosets, aguti and random animals galleries in the cromer zoo section.