Saturday Morning With Danai and Connor (Malayan Tigers at the San Diego Zoo)

Last Saturday I spent about 3 hours at the Malayan Tiger enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, and got almost no photos. Granted, I did spend almost an hour of that on the phone for work, but still, even though I could see Connor almost the entire time, he stayed way up at the top of the hill. Most Zoo visitors that walked by couldn't even tell where he was. Whenever I spotted someone who looked particularly disappointed I would show them how to see him - or at least, what you could see of him.

Today was much better.  When I first got there Danai was napping right out in front. 

Over the course of the next hour and a half or so she would occasionally get up and move to another spot.

She was pretty lethargic most of the morning, but if you looked closely you could see that she wasn't always asleep.

At one point a keeper came by and tossed one of those giant femur bones over to her.  Once she realized what was going on she jumped up pretty quickly and headed down to shore of the pond to get it.

That thing is quite the mid-morning snack.

She hauled that bone back up to the rock ledge by the tree in the middle of the enclosure and spent the next half hour or so munching on it. I think it's safe to say that this is the "don't even think about taking my bone" look.

I took a walk over to the Amur Leopards for a little break. The last few times I've been there this one has been way to close to the front of the cage for me to get a shot that makes the cage disappear. I got lucky today.

There are a lot more pictures of the Amur Leopards in some of my earlier blog posts, which you can find in the Archive listing at the bottom of this page.

I walked back towards the exit the same way I came in - right past the tigers. At about 1:30pm Danai went in for the evening, and Connor came out. The keeper had put out a few handfuls of meat for him, but he want straight for the femur bone that Danai had left behind. He worked on that for quite a while, at one point you could hear a pretty loud snap as he crunched through it.

Connor had his second birthday at the beginning of April.

As I was leaving Connor decided to go wading in the upper pond, and I managed to get a few close-up shots of him.   

Click here to see more pictures of Malayan Tigers Danai and Connor, and also the Amur Leopards whose names I can't seem to remember.