I spent a full and productive day at the Shedd Aquarium, in Chicago. I wanted to spend a day taking pictures, I'd been wanting to ever since I found out that not only did my entry in the photo contest at the zoo not win, but a wolf shot that wasn't as good as my wolf shots that I passed over got third place. I'm really not happy with the judging this year. Last year I was able to agree that the shots that placed higher than mine were better. This year I'm only willing to say that about one of the four adult class winners. It's frustrating.. but I know that's how it goes sometimes. So I wanted to go out and take a bunch more pictures. I'd never brought my camera to the Shedd before, it was a whole new experience just waiting for me. And they had a temporary exhibit featuring nothing but lizards, one of my favorite types of animals. I'll do a full thread with more of the shots I got from that trip, but when I got home I discovered that my shot counter reset at some point during the day. Meaning I'd passed shot number 10,000. And this is it. Meet Faust (he has a half-brother named Dante), the star animal of the lizard exhibit. On loan from somewhere in Texas, he is a Komodo Dragon. He was hand raised by people, and although still potentially dangerous, especially when there's food around, I'm told they spend time every day paying attention to him, scratching his head between his eyes, that sort of thing. Apparently if a keeper is sitting down in the exhibit he'll walk up and put his head in their lap. Even watching him, he looked like a dog. He spent most of his time lying down near the glass barrier, and occasionally he lifted his head up slightly, as if looking at the person on the other side of the glass, and then would set it down again. He looked like a tired dog who'd acknowledged the entrance of a new person and then went back to resting. He was not the highlight of the exhibit for me, not by a long shot. But the stories of how they deal with him were fascinating, I wish I could have seen him putting his head in a keeper's lap. [This attachment has been purged. Older attachments are purged from time to time to conserve disk space. Please feel free to repost your image.]
