There's hardly any part of photography you can truly call predictable. The only part you can plan, is deciding: "Today is the day I'm going to take out my camera and take some photos".
This is especially true when photographing animals - be they wild, domesticated or living at a zoo. There are no guarantees they'll be visible or cooperate. The weather could be bad, the lighting too harsh, and so on, and so forth. Many factors that can turn any zoo visit around and change it completely, either for the better or the worse...
When we started visiting Dierenpark Zie-ZOO, we soon fell in love with the Dholes. M had fallen in love with the species as a child, since they were the closest she'd come to seeing a Red Fox. Seeing them again - and on a regular basis too - after so many years of not seeing them at all, had us very excited indeed.
The older Dholes were soon accompanied by some younger individuals, and their character and behavior endeared them to us that much more. The group, consisting of some easy-going females and exuberant males, were soon our favorites at the zoo and there was many a time when I was convinced they - especially the males - liked us too.
We've had some amazing experiences with them, and their pups (all thirteen of them, 7 girls and 5 boys) who were born in March, 2018. It's a privilege to see any animal grow up from a baby to an adult, but these pups will always hold a dear place in our hearts.
I was rather disappointed to learn that the zoo had come to an agreement with a German zoo, to split up the group. The females would remain, the males would move to DinoZoo Metelen. This way, any undesired breeding would be naturally prevented.
The boys moved in the summer of 2019. We'd planned to visit, we truly did. But somehow, it slipped our minds and then we were hit with the pandemic. Zoos were closed, traveling was pretty much prohibited.
But during a lull in the pandemic, on October 31 of 2020 we finally made the drive to go see what we had started calling "our" boys. As plans go, it was a good one - except we almost got lost in the zoo itself. We had to eventually ask for directions to even find the Dholes.
As soon as the path cleared and we saw their new home, we were amazed by their huge habitat. It was incredible - like a forest within a forest. The autumn colors were stunning, and just what we were hoping for. Alas, we had not calculated the predicament this placed us in: a huge habitat, reddish autumn colors and reddish Dholes do not make it easy to photograph them at all.
Would we have traveled all this way, to a foreign country no less, just to not see who we came to see?
Luckily, "our" boys soon came strolling in. Leisurely at first, but when the once-pups (now 2.5 years old) saw people, they soon showed the behavior we'd come to associate with this family of Dholes.
They are very attuned to people, looking for interaction and play with people from the other side of the fence. Due to the pandemic, part of the path along their habitat was cut off, which made this a bit more difficult. And as we'd grown to learn, their habit of playing consists of running close to the fences - making it near impossible to photograph them at all.
As I was counting heads and learning their all-grown-up faces, I noticed one of the pups had grown into a gorgeous adult with a very white chest. This is a feature we'd so far only seen with the (dominant) females. While there is no real hierarchy amongst Dholes, there is a slight one where one is the boss - they tend to be a bit more white, where the more submissive ones are darker. This made us suspect this young boy had become the dominant one in the group.
But where did this leave the fathers of the male pups?
The fathers had always been easy to identify, firstly by their more mature face and their coloring. Secondly, it was their behavior that made them stand out. The one I'd taken to calling Ashes, had the darkest face of the adults, and loved running; he's the one who taught the others - including the females - to interact and play with people. The one I'd taken to calling Jumper, had some white hair on his chest and chin, and was the best jumper of the whole group.
It took a lot of watching and waiting, but I soon spotted them both. It had been a little more than a year since I'd last seen them, but they seemed to have aged by 5 years or more. The missed the pep in their step I was used to seeing, and they kept to the back mostly, not coming over to see the people, sticking to patrolling the edges of their habitat.
Ashes especially was very hard to photograph and we eventually did not take any decent photo of him at all. Jumper eventually veered off his chosen path, to help one of his pups who'd had his eyes set on a certain branch. The pup was jumping for it, but kept missing and did not reach the branch at all. Jumper demonstrated how it's done - jumping up and taking hold of the branch to shake it.
If we had known what I know now, we might have stayed longer, tried harder. Ashes and Jumper passed away early 2021.
But as any photographer will say, we've still got the visual memories, which I will share with you as a last passage to this animal encounter.
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