I've been looking for something to post, it's been too long since I've been out so I've been going through my records. Since I've been going on about the leopards I wanted to show the canid family some love. ; Here we've got a pair of apparently closely related foxes, I haven't gone into their relatedness but they sure look like they share a close kinship. First up is the bat eared fox. ; I guess I call this shot "how the bat eared fox got it's name". Secondly we have a friendly little fennec. ; This was another of those neat little zoo moments. ; It was the middle of winter, I've heard before that zoo animals get lonely when attendance goes down or if the zoo closes. ; I always found that a little difficult to believe, but, well, this was taken in January 2009 and I saw the most life out of the fennecs that I've ever seen. ; Usually they're kind of reclusive, staying away from the people who have come to see them. ; But on this day this one was out walking around and walked right up to see me. ; The only problem was it was so dark (simulated night for a nocturnal animal) that I was at ISO 12,800 and F4, but was still down to 1/40th of a second. ; I've tried enhancing this but there's just not that much there, it's dark, it's noisy, and I was hand holding at 1/40th of a second at 159mm. ; That's not a recipe for success, but it's still a useful record of a rare occurrence. If you think the fennec looks tiny you're right, they're the smallest species of canid. ; The proportions make it look like a young animal, but from what I can tell that appears to be the size and proportion of an adult. [attachments posted prior to 4/27/2010 have been deleted by admin. be sure to link images to make sure they don't get removed]
Adorable little things...nice captures, especially considering what you had to do to get the second shot!
