Oakland Zoo & Safari West...

Took a couple of trips this year to the Oakland Zoo and to Safari West which is located up in Santa Rosa.
The first set of photos were taken at the Oakland Zoo.
I haven't been to too many zoos in my life,
but Oakland seems to have a pretty nice layout for the animals.

I also saw this leaf lying on the pavement near the otter pen and thought it worthy of a photo.

These next photos were taken up in Santa Rosa at Safari West.
Pretty cool place to visit, but not quite what I was expecting.
I was thinking it would be like a Safari Park you see in photos of from Africa.
You know, Lions and Tigers and Monkeys running around and climbing on the vehicles, etc.,
but this was a bit more mundane.
The couple of cats they do have are in smaller enclosures as are the Rhinoceros.
I guess with the open vehicle format they use,
the Big Cats and Elephants and whatnot would just be too dangerous for the patrons,
so they have a lot of the more sedate animals.
Zebras, Wildebeests, Giraffes, Ostriches, Gazelles, etc.
The prey animals from the Savannah.
Not quite as exciting, but still fun to photograph.

These last couple of shots are some abstracts of a few of the animals.
The first shot is Porcupine Quills.

Next are the feathers on a Buzzard.

And last but not least,
as I was trying to adjust the exposure on a shot of a giraffe,
I noticed that there was a reflection of our jeep in it's eye,
so I blew out the exposure on the giraffe to get the image in the eye,
which I think turned out rather cool.

Well that's all for now folks.