My mom and sister visited the weekend before last (yeah, I'm slacking) on their way back from visiting my niece in New York, along with a few choice destinations in America's hat. They'd already been to (presumably) better aquariums and natural history museums, so I dragged them along to the zoo (as they weren't too set on driving up Pike's Peak)...

But to cut to the chase, this time, the wallaby exhibit was unfenced (though they're corralled in by larger fences with double-gates), which immediately made it the most impressive marsupial exhibit I've seen to date. Granted, without the protection of inner fences, they spent much of their time glued to the exterior walls, but not having to snake a camera around mesh fence is awesome.



Wallabies aside, they've got a bunch of excellent new exhibits as part of their Rocky Mountain Wild expansion that are large and well designed. A huge improvement over, say the Snow Leopard habitat, which is neither - the tradeoff being, the larger the enclosure, the less likely you are to see anything. Their bear exhibit is excellent as well, featuring a pond stocked with fish pressed against the viewing glass:



All in all, definitely worth a visit if you're into animals at all. Sure, it's not San Diego, but given its size and location, it packs a lot into a tiny exhibit.

Oh and camera arrived, and I like it quite a bit. It's easy to abuse the zoom lens too:



Though when telescoped, I've found that you really gotta work hard to stabilize your shot or your results will get messy fast. It also seems wiser to fix the autozoom onto the center, so you don't end up with tragically mis-focused shots like this:



Anyway, the results (minus the family photos) are all up here. All were taken in RAW and exported to JPG with Lightroom.

And with that out of the way, next I can get to Dr. Horrible...