Yesterday I went with some families from my church to the Wildlife World Zoo in Phoenix. The weather was flawless all day. I got to feed bits of apple to a lory parrot perched on my arm; it nibbled away the flesh with its sharp little hooked beak, leaving the skin and core behind. There were swans, both black and white; flamingoes, elegantly two-tone in salmon and pale pink; exquisitely spotted ocelots; colourful parrots; oryx with yard-long horns curving to needle-sharp points; dainty gazelles with smart dark stripes along their sides; monkeys brachiating effortlessly across their mesh-roofed enclosures; snoozing hamsters; thick-furred fennec foxes with big ears; prairie dogs setting lookouts atop tall rocks. The kids romped with baby goats in the petting area and fed grain to the giraffes at the tall feeding station.
As a photographic expedition, it wasn't a huge success for me, between the low winter light, the cages, and the fact that my camera batteries ran low halfway around the zoo, but I'm rather pleased with the giraffe shots.
Afterwards, we adjoined to White Tanks Park for hotdogs, and then went for a fairly gentle hike, only a mile there and a mile back, on a trail that wound among the bushes, rocks and cacti, mostly in the shadow of the mountain. I'd forgotten the way low light draws glowing outlines around a saguaro on the skyline. Some of the boulders bore ancient native pictographs, pale stylized scribbles of snakes and flowers and less identifiable things.
Towards the end, the trail turned steeper, and involved a bit of scrambling over the rocks. The destination turned out to be a waterfall, in the sense that my local Rillito is a river; no water to speak of, but an impressive rock cauldron, with a chute down maybe forty feet of cliff, to suggest that it must be quite something when it rains.
As a photographic expedition, it wasn't a huge success for me, between the low winter light, the cages, and the fact that my camera batteries ran low halfway around the zoo, but I'm rather pleased with the giraffe shots.
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Afterwards, we adjoined to White Tanks Park for hotdogs, and then went for a fairly gentle hike, only a mile there and a mile back, on a trail that wound among the bushes, rocks and cacti, mostly in the shadow of the mountain. I'd forgotten the way low light draws glowing outlines around a saguaro on the skyline. Some of the boulders bore ancient native pictographs, pale stylized scribbles of snakes and flowers and less identifiable things.
Towards the end, the trail turned steeper, and involved a bit of scrambling over the rocks. The destination turned out to be a waterfall, in the sense that my local Rillito is a river; no water to speak of, but an impressive rock cauldron, with a chute down maybe forty feet of cliff, to suggest that it must be quite something when it rains.
