Grr - this is one of the photos you showed us at the Arnhem Collector's Fair to reassure us they were still there before our visit a few days later - by the time we got there they'd moved to California!
Zoogiraffe was crying for days!
(Mind you, it probably didn't help that I kept telling him stories of seeing these two wonderful species myself in San Diego and how he was missing out!)
Indeed, I remember now showing them to you in the zoo restaurant on the Friday night!
Really? To this day I've considered myself a lucky bastard because I managed to shot such great photos, but now I consider myself a bloody lucky bastard because I got to see them, making the photos a bonus!
But are you sure that they were gone and that the gate to the area was not just closed? I ask because there was no sign of them leaving soon (e.g. no crates or equipment visible) and everything seemed to be normal. Hardly you were there more than a week after me! The trainers allowed us really close to get photos, took photos with our own cameras; just a great experience and something I will live on forever (Sorry Zoogiraffe!)
Fortunately for Zoogiraffe, seeing a Beluga doesn't take more than a Ryanair ticket down to Valencia (and the walruses are a bonus) but Piebald Dolphin is a different story sadly; that would mean a British Airways ticket to Chicago (Shedd) or all the way to Japan!
We had a peer through - pool boarded off, empty, both cetaceans gone! They did still have the Atlantic Bottlenoses and the Orinoco Dolphins (new for all of us), of course.
I`m still not over it and your photo has just brought it all back to me I will be having sleepless nights for weeks again now.
Seriously thanks for posting them great pictures.
Your post makes me think how the young and foolish me needs to go on a zoo marathon over the next few years to see the singles and pairs left in this or that zoo which are the only ones left in captivity.
I'm glad to have delighted you with those photos. Mind you it was 6 years ago, it was only around two months ago that I started to upload photos here, after being a member for more than two years now, and it's been quite an exhausting project to upload 7 years of digital photos (while certainly a pleasant task nonetheless, but the poor brain had to remember so many years back). Not to mention that once I have uploaded all my digital photos (should be finished in about two weeks - I have a life too you know! I need to scan everything I took before I purchased my first digital camera in 2003. Just the thought of that makes me sweat! (fortunately my dad's old zoo photos from the 70s and 80s were scanned in a lab cause they were taken off the original slides!)
Thanks Ituri, been to Shedd seven years ago, remember all now. I also visited SeaWorld San Diego, having been told before that they had Commerson's and also Ringed Seals but neither one did I see then.
