Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary

In a dimly lit room with very large aquaria along one wall, the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary has several platypus in captivity. Here is the best shot I could come up with. The ISO was set to Hi2 on my Nikon D800E and the Aperture was open all the way to f/1.8. No flashes were allowed. There are much smaller animals that I imagined - perhaps 15 -18 inches long. They are busy swimmers.




This was a difficult place to photograph birds. They were all behind a heavy grid fencing all the way to the roof. I tried to eliminate the effect on this Black Red Tailed Cockatoo by putting the lens against the screen and letting the shallow depth of field blur it out of view as much as possible. If you look closely, you can see the remains of the screen grid.

Of course, the main attraction at the sanctuary are the Koalas. Here's a sample.

One of the birds we saw there that we will never see in the wild is the Tawny Frogmouth. These birds are in the nightjar family and are great at camouflage. Since they spend all day hiding and are basically impossible see when they don't want to be seen, this is the best I can do. Also note that this image has the same screen superimposed as of field the earlier bird shot. Because I've changed lenses to one with an even smaller depth (from the 85 mm to the 200-500 mm at 200 mm), the stripes are only really noticeable in the bokeh.

For those, like me who grew up in the days of Bugs Bunny and the Tasmanian Devil, here is a real life one.

This animals are endangered because of habitat loss but also because of a "Devil Nose Tumor". Apparently, these guy are dying of a genetically transmitted cancer.

The other residents worth mentioning here are lizards. Of course, there were plenty of water dragons everywhere, even in the enclosures for many of the animals. But here are a few of the larger lizards who I cannot remember the names of now.

I just heard that Australia is a place with one of the longest life expectancies in the world. The claim on television is that 1/3 of the people born now will live past 100. Even with all these dangerous animals - we saw a whole array of poisonous snakes on display here including the 1st and 2nd most poisonous in the world - the folks here like long lives. Perhaps they are among the most careful or most clever as well.