A good fun evening at London Zoo tonight, at the preview evening of the Society’s annual photo exhibition.
The standard, as ever, was extremely high and it was great to see a whole range of species featured. The exhibition, which has a range of images in ultra-large format ranged, gallery-esque outside the main restaurant, is well worth a visit, and runs until December.
As you can see, I was fortunate enough to get one of my images involved this year; that of an Arctic Fox that I watched in cripplingly low temperatures near Seal River in Canada’s Hudson Bay last October (a place where I’ll be heading back to in about 6 weeks’ time actually for more polar bears, foxes, caribou and ptarmigan!).
This particular fox spent around an hour attempting to punch a hole in the thickening ice of the Bay itself…an obviously futile exercise. Nevertheless, if there were prizes for persistence, then this particular fox would certainly have won one! Quite what he hoped to achieve is beyond me. At the time I felt perhaps there was a piece of kelp around 4-6 inches in the ice that he could see, and therefore was optimistic of getting through to, but on reflection, I’m not so sure. Perhaps he was just practicing?!
Anyway, get along to see the exhibition if you can – it is certainly an inspiring one. It was also good to meet Bill Oddie – who as you can see from the pic – has lost nothing in timing and the delivery of one-liners, as he managed to get me laughing just at the moment when the shutter got pressed!
Of course, visiting the exhibition also means getting entry to the Zoo itself. ZSL is one of my favourite charities, and although we can all argue the rights and wrongs of putting animals in captivity, there is no doubt that collections in Regents Park, along with the sister park Whipsnade, sited high on the Dunstable Downs, have done an awful lot to put conservation in the spotlight as well as play an active role in the captive breeding and preservation of some of our most iconic, critically endangered species, and a great many of those that most of us would otherwise simply never known would have even existed.