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• My encounter with Orangutans in Lok Kawi Wildlife Park. (ajithphotography.wordpress.com)

This picture of a Binturong, aka a bearcat, was taken at the San Diego Zoo some time ago. This is probably one of the stranger looking mammals I’ve seen, almost as strange as an echidna or platypus, because it kind of looks like a cat, a raccoon and a sloth at the same time. The animal hits a weight of around 25-30 pounds, which would put in right in the neighborhood of a small dog (probably why some people in SouthEast Asia keep them as pets!).

Lok Kawi Wildlife Park is a zoo on the island of Borneo,located  in the Sabah province of Malaysia (Borneo actually has three countries with a presence on the island). The zoo had a great collection of animals that are largely endemic to Malaysia only, so I would recommend taking a few hour trip there to check it out.

These Sun Bears were playing around and I decided to take some snaps. While I am no expert in animal behavior, my guess is that the smaller bear is displaying submissive behavior to a male.

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The orangutan is slowly becoming my favorite primate because of their facial expressions.  When I see a picture like this, it is hard not to wonder what the orangutan was thinking about at that particular time (“Am I going to get out of Singapore Zoo?”, “What’s for lunch?”).

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The only reason I’m posting this is that this is one of my most viewed photos at Flickr. While I don’t think the picture of the Panda Bear is bad at all, I actually like a number of other Panda pictures that I took at the Chiang Mai Zoo that day. I guess it just a matter of taste…I largely enjoy doing a lot of close-up photography work.

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This Western Lowland Gorilla at the San Francisco Zoo may have been in the mood for love (or he was just hungry, which is probably far more accurate than any kind of hormonal drive).  It is very hard for me not to be anthropomorphic with members of the primate family, since their expressions are not that much different than ours when displaying anger, sadness or other items we define as uniquely human.

Given the bad rap that Oakland gets,  not to mention that it is always second fiddle to San Francisco in many ways, I was actually quite surprised at how nice the Oakland Zoo is. Most of the animals in the zoo had a great deal of space in their exhibit, and they were generally pretty active compared to the animals in the San Francisco Zoo (perhaps it is due to the foggier nature of San Francisco).

This White-Handed Lar Gibbon was obviously very deep in thought when I took this picture. I’ve also had the good fortune of seeing gibbons in the wild while in Thailand, and I’ve also been to the Gibbon Rehabilitation Center in Phuket, Thailand (former pets or injured animals that they try to rehabilitate to put back in the wild).

Note: It is very common to see people with Gibbons that you can take your picture with in Patong. Please don’t take your picture with these animals, as cool as it may be, because the gibbon is only there because the mother was killed to get the infant. I made this mistake on my first two trips to Thailand:-(

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I must say that taking pictures of any of the tamarins at the San Francisco Zoo is quite daunting. In addition to the Pied Tamarins being extremely active (jumping all over the place), the glass display really works against you because of finger smudges on the glass, flaring from the sun, and the buildup of condensation.

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The Snow Leopard is one of the more mysterious of the big cats (little is known about them because they live at fairly extreme altitudes). As I hadn’t been to the San Francisco Zoo in a little over a year, it was nice to see that the Snow Leopards were moved in to a public viewing area so I could actually take photographs of them (I believe the two leopards were in the cat house for quite some time, which wasn’t accessible to the public following the tiger attack there several years ago).

The one drawback about San Francisco Zoo these days: all of the dangerous mammals have quite a bit of cage and fencing around them now, so taking photographs of some of the animals isn’t quite as easy as it used to be.

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Cute little guy (or gal, didn’t check that closely). While I didn’t have the opportunity to see the orangutans in Borneo in as natural of a setting as I would’ve liked at the Rasa Ria Reserve) , it is simply amazing how you can see how “human” these animals are with some of their mannerisms (very much like a young child, dependent on help and desiring affection from a figure regarded as a parent ).

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I got bored today and decided to trek up to San Francisco Zoo to take some snaps today. While I think the zoo isn’t the best in the world, it is generally less busy than places like the San Diego Zoo & there are still a number of cool animals there (my favorite zoo, or favourite for you Brits, is still the Singapore Zoo). I snapped this picture of a Western Lowland Gorilla & was fairly pleased with the results.

This little squirrel monkey was so cute at the Lok Kawi Wildlife Park in Sabah (Borneo), Malaysia. While the wildlife park is more like a zoo than a park, the animals appear to be well-taken care of and there is a variety of wildlife in the park that is native to Borneo (squirrel monkeys are not, obviously).

There were two difficulties with getting this shot: it was taken through a fence; and my lens on Sony DSLR was pretty fogged over from the air-conditioning from the ride over in the taxi. If anyone has any tricks on not having your lenses get condensation when moving from a cool to hot location, please let me know.

I love ring-tailed lemurs (and all lemurs).  This particular picture was taken at the San Francisco Zoo, and the lemur exhibit is probably one of the nicer animal enclosures that can be found at the zoo (there are several types of lemurs in the enclosure).

If I am fortunate enough to go to Madagascar one day, I will be going because of the lemurs.

One of my favorite exhibits at the Singapore Zoo is a walk-in aviary that they have. While aviary would seem to mean “birds”, the aviary at Singapore Zoo has a host of birds and other animals, so you will find many smaller mammals inside of the exhibit as well ( a baby lemur kept attacking my shorts).

I caught this three-toed sloth doing what they do best…sleeping!