It snowed a lot yesterday and last night, but it’s also been quite windy so the trees look a bit boring. But otherwise, it looks a lot like winter and we drove to Orsa Björnpark so see the animals in the fresh snow. In theory, a great idea – we even had perfect light for zoo photography – but the animals were surprisingly shy. I thought they would have enjoyed the snow, because there hasn’t been much of it in Orsa until now, either.
First effort at the tiger enclosure, we didn’t see as much as a paw print in the fresh snow. With the snow leopards, there was one, but on the wrong side of the pavement (the lower enclosure, which is much harder to shoot than the upper enclosure). Then, no trace of the persian leopards, but we figured that there must be something going on with the polar bears. Sure enough, when we were approaching, we saw one polar bear on the ice and it looked really beautiful when it ran with the powder snow flying around. Alas, by the time we got to shooting distance, it had uncovered a tire and was busy playing with it. I mean, nothing wrong with a polar bear having fun, but that black tire… it’s not exactly natural, you know?
So we went back up to the tigers and this time all the way up to the Tiger Mountain building to see if any tigers could be sighted in the upper tiger enclosure. And now we actually saw them so we waded through the deep snow drifts (they hadn’t plowed everywhere yet) to get to the bridge. It’s just not very photographer friendly because you’re mostly looking down to the animals, but after a bit of waiting, one of the tigers walked up the hill so it was almost eye level with us and gave us some opportunities.
There wasn’t any point in staying there longer even if we had some daylight still left. You can’t expect to get great opportunities every time, so we decided to go back a bit later in the winter when there’s still snow but also a bit more light and hopefully more (active) animals!