Common, common, common chameleon

Do you like the title? I wonder if you picked up the nod to a song by Boy George? The Education Dept had put a play on the words in the text that is on the ID sign and  I couldn't resist doing something similar, because it just screams to be done, doesn't it :)

Another short week... with a Bank Holiday on Monday, I was in just on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Tuesday 28th
Here is where I had got to last week with the common chameleon.

I had got a base coat of rough colour on the body ready to start detailing this week.

But first thing that greeted us this morning in the kitchen was this delicious looking display of cakes.

The cupcakes are homemade by one of the ladies in Education Dept, who had a birthday at the weekend. We have this lovely 'tradition' that when it is your birthday you bring in goodies for everyone to share. And today there are two birthday's worth of goodies. Needless to say.. the cakes, disappeared rapidly... and they were very yummy.

So Back to the chameleon...

I worked on the painting all day, with just a couple of breaks for a few other little jobs, giving convenient 'eye-breaks'. I am adding the texture of the chameleon by dotting the colour on and started with the head and moved back across the body from right to left.

As for the other little jobs... I had a couple of email requests to print some extra ID signs... one was for the Goeldi's monkeys (the expanding group have been split up and a sign was needed for the second group's new home). The second was for a scientific name change on the lesser goliath beetles. Got both printed, laminated and delivered to section or put up on display before the end of the day.

Another little job was to remove some gorilla interpretation signage and props from the portacabin by the Education Centre. It had been used as a store whilst the gorilla house gets it make-over for all the 'set dressing' items and signage. Now the room was needed for teaching sessions so had to be cleared out. Louise and I took out a few items that were the responsibility of the Graphics section, one included the life size wooden panel cut out of a gorilla standing upright with the arms outstretched. The arms of a male gorilla are as long as they are tall and so it was quite a thing to manoeuvre through doors and up stairways that had right angle turns in them. Got it to the Prep Room and had to leave it obstructing a cupboard.. there was no where to put it where the arms wouldn't be sticking out to clobber unsuspecting passerbys or where it wasn't obstructing something. I think we're going to have to do some reshuffling of stuff in our storage areas to get it somewhere safe and out of the way.

Lastly at the end of the day I started planning out how I would do the chart for the ID request submissions. This was something discussed in my half yearly appraisal... I had collated all the info I had on dates of when ID requests were received and when the illustration got done. Once we have got this going properly I can then better assess my work load.

Wednesday 29th

Continued working on the chameleon today, had hoped to finish it but needed frequent breaks for my eyes as doing all the dots was a little hard on the eyes. I'm quite happy with it so far...I am trying to get a colour that is mid way between when I have seen the chameleon looking really green and when I have seen it looking almost sandy coloured. 

So by the end of the day this was where I was at with it... just the tail left to do next week.

I started the day off though by continuing with the chart for the ID requests... think I've come up with a chart that will work.

Each animal section has its own colour, so I can see when say invert or bird ID requests come in... putting the species name and date received under the appropriate month, I also mark in when the illustration was done. At the moment the information is not quite reading well as there are numerous illustrations that I have done where I do not have a date of when the request came in. So already this chart is showing me I have to be more aware of that, to keep better records. 

Here are some photo's that I took in the zoo this week, on the few occasions I got to go out into the grounds.

This is Satan... a velvet swimming crab in Bug World, he's a bit of a bullish character in his tank, but he's very handsomely marked. On his legs he has shiny stripes of purple blue.. looks like he's wearing very natty pyjama's.

Then I went into the Aquarium, always good to wander through and see if Jonny has sneaked any new fish in...sometimes I spot a new arrival, but this week if there were any new additions, I didn't see them. 

But the red-bellied piranha - Pygocentrus nattereri caught my eye.. Jonny has set up a lovely tank for them.. looks very dramatic and shows the fish off beautifully.

The scales of these piranha always fascinate me. They look like they have gold flecks embedded into their skin... when the light catches these flecks, they sparkle. Jewels from the Amazon.

But they don't have a smooth skin surface... it's scales and if you look closely they are not uniformly laid out along the body... in places the scales get quite higgledly piggley... and some of them are shiny, whilst most are not. But look at the colours, in even the dark area of their body.

And then.. one of my favourite fish (of which I admit there are quite a few candidates)...

The Dragonfish...or Asian arowana - Scleropages formosus. Sadly, not a great photo of one.. but they had just been fed and so were moving about quite actively, making it tricky in a large tank with low lighting to get a decent shot.

Wednesday 22nd

It was a very short working week at the zoo this last week, as I had taken both the Monday and Tuesday as holiday... so that I could work in my role as a self employed wildlife artist, rather than an employed wildlife illustrator. I was doing a demo evening in Gloucestershire on Monday to an art group, so that would be a late night back home (nearly midnight by the time I had unloaded the car etc); I needed Tuesday to unpack and put away from that and prepare for the two workshops I was to do on Thursday and Friday. So it was just Wednesday that I was at the zoo.

The souslik's were due to be put in their enclosure, after finishing quarantine off-show, this week, probably Monday, but ID signs were still on my desk when I got in on Wednesday. After giving the mammal section a call, I learnt that they were only put in this morning and would most likely stay pretty much hidden for the day until they had settled in. So first job was to pop out and put the signs up.. two copies of the ID sign and one sign explaining why we have wire strung over the top of the enclosure. There were no sign of any sousliks... I was keen to see them as their keepers had said that they were very small and cute, much smaller than the black-tailed prairie dogs we had there before. The European souslik is Europe's version of the prairie dog and is endangered in the wild.

I started painting the common chameleon illustration; the background I did last week I was still happy with so I painted in a few twigs before starting the chameleon itself. I didn't get very far with the painting today as I seemed to have lots of little jobs come up that took me away from my brushes.

One of those jobs was to laminate 27 A5 signs for the Edible Flower Garden that has been done in conjunction with a local school. The Garden Department allocate a flower bed to the school for one of their projects; to design a layout for plants that can be eaten or used as herbs etc. The 27 signs were drawn by the children and were the names of the plants used, such as cornflower, ox-eye daisy, borage and lavender. The signs were already cut to size I had only to put two side by side in an A4 laminate pouch and then cut in half at after lamination.

Another of the little jobs was to removed damaged interp from a walkway near the AmphiPod. On the posts of the covered walkway there are some flap signs...on the topside of the lid is a question or statement and by lifting the wooden flap you then see the answer or more information. Two of the flaps had been broken off so needed to be removed... I removed a third that had the topside question missing so it was pointless just having the answer up.

This last job was done at the end of the day and as I walked back to the studio I went via the souslik enclosure to see if they were out now that the zoo was quieter. As I approached I saw several dive down into the tunnels, so I found a spot behind a small shrub that was near to one of the holes and luckily the wind direction carried my scent away from the enclosure. I waited for about 5 minutes before one poked its head bravely out of the hole. A few more minutes of patient wait, not moving or making a sound  and one came out warily.. I managed to get three photos before it disappeared when someone else approached the paddock.

Rather less shy was this pudu, who came across to see what I was up to. The late afternoon sun turned the red tones of its coat up a notch bringing out those longer hairs on its head. 

I realise that I did not post a picture of the altered panther chameleon from the week before.. so here is a before and after image of the colour adjustments I had to make.

A new addition to the team

This week we welcomed a new member of staff to the Graphics Team; Louise has been employed as the graphic designer for Wild Place. Her first day was Monday and seems to be taking everything in her stride and settling in well in the team already.

Monday 13th
First job of the day was to respond to an email from the bird section. We no longer have brown breasted barbets in the collection so I went across to the lovebird aviary where they had been housed as well and removed the last of the ID signs for the barbet.

The panther chameleon that I finished last week needed to be checked and as Tim (Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians) wasn't in, I arranged to see Andy from the same Section. My coloration was incorrect..I had the chameleon too dull and green. We looked at my reference pictures and Andy deduced that at the time I took the photo's the animal was young and not fully matured into his more striking blue coloration that he now sported generally when calm and happy. We went to check the animal on display and Andy commented that his coloration was unusually dark.... not his normal self, so we went up to the off show area in the vet block to see another panther chameleon. His coloration was calm and quite blue... I took some more photo's and then headed back to the studio.

I altered the illustration fairly easily by carefully laying several translucent washes of blue and bluey green over the chameleon's body. This has to be done carefully so as not to lift the colour that has  already been painted. Then on top of that I dotted some more colour on to regain the skin texture and highlights. I added red also, a colour which was not present at all on the animal when I had initially taken the reference photos back last year.

Once done I went back to Andy and got the ok. The illustration was then scanned into the computer and placed on the ID sign, replacing the photo that was used until the illustration was done. The picture part of the sign was then printed, ready to laminate and take over to the section tomorrow.

Whilst out to-ing and fro-ing between the Reptile House I took a few photo's. The floral display outside the Reptile house has lost it's yellow of daffodils and now black tulips stand proudly in the sun. They looked like they were made of satin with that silvery sheen they had.

In the Reptile House the crocs were sat on the side of their pool where the female builds a nest and she was sat on top of a recently dug up mound. Maybe she's getting broody again.

One of the dinosaurs was being attacked... seems the jackdaws are plucking the feathering cover of Citipati, perhaps it is making good nesting material.

Tuesday 14th

When I came in this morning I looked at the printed picture of the panther chameleon and wasn't happy with it. So I reprinted it readjusting the colour at the same time, increasing the saturation and lowering the lightness. It came out much better.

On to the common chameleon.... I had 100 photo's of this chameleon on the computer... got some lovely sequences of movement in frame by frame motion. I had to go through each one to select the most useful and delete the ones that were too similar or slightly out of focus. This reduced the folder containing them from 500mb to just 148mb for 44 photo's! After thinking about the best pose for the illustration shape format, I selected a number of images to work from and arranging them onto an illustrator document to size and position onto an A4 sheet, I printed that and started the drawing.

This drawing spanned an A3 sketch pad sheet of paper, so to be able to trace the drawing across onto a piece of watercolour paper that would fit onto an A4 scanner, I needed to photocopy it to a slightly smaller size. Finally, before I headed home I cut a piece of watercolour paper to size ready to start painting on tomorrow.

Another picture, or two, from today... Kukena catching a ride with his Mum.

Wednesday 15th

Before I started painting the common chameleon I decided to check the coloration of the animal with Tim, as the photo's I had were also taken last year and I didn't want to have to alter another illustration. Chameleons are tricky things to illustrate as an identification image as they change their colour according to their mood or in response to one another. When I took the photo's of the common chameleon they were very green (not sexually dimorphic) but every time I see the one on show it is a pale sandy colour. Today when I popped up to check it's colour it was inbetween green and sandy. Talking to Andy from Reptiles, seems green is the 'normal' colour.. so we have a dilemma... do I paint it green or sandy coloured, either way it could look totally different to the animal. After discussions I'm going to paint it a greeny sandy colour part way between the two so that it's never too far off the animals colour as it changes.

I finished off the morning by painting a quick nondescript background for the chameleon.

After lunch it was my drawing afternoon... so I headed out and had a little wander. What was I to sketch today? I found myself up on the top terrace hoping to see the lion cubs out, they were but tucked right at the back up on the rocks. The drills were out so I settled down in front of them for about an hour and a half. These primates (related to Mandrills and baboons) are impressive looking animals and very active... always on the move, investigating this, investigating that. I struggled but kept at them. One did eventually sit for a while and looking up at one point I noticed he was nodding his head at me.... not just once but several times. I soon realised it was in response to me inadvertently nodding my head as I sketched him. I realised I was looking directly at him and then looking down to sketch a line or two before looking up again. I wondered if this was a friendly gesture or a threat one. I decided to be very careful and made sure I didn't 'nod' as I sketched, just in case. The last thing I wanted to do was upset the drill... that wouldn't be fair on him.

Whilst I was there Sarah, their keeper, came to give them a snack of fresh vegetables. I asked her about some of the behaviours I had seen, in particular the head nodding. It was indeed a threat gesture and she advised that if one of them started this and got agitated then it would be best if I walked away from the enclosure. You have to be so careful sometimes, something we think of as innocuous or don't even realise we are doing, can actually be very threatening to some animals. Luckily Donga or Rorke did not have any further adverse reactions to my movements as I sketched. They, in fact, came up close a number of times to sit near or look at me.

This is Rorke, what incredible facial structure drills have.

After sitting in front of the drills  for almost 2 hours was getting a little chilled (I had sat in the shade to cut the amount of reflections I could see on the glass of the drill enclosure) so I headed next to the Reptile House where it is a lovely toasty temperature.

Utila spiny tailed iguana

Did a few sketches there and then moved back out into the sun for the last half hour with the gorillas.

Whilst all eyes were on the gorillas, Salome was out and Kukena was being entertaining, when he wasn't hitching a ride on Mum. But almost hidden at the edge of the waterfall, just yards away, going unnoticed, there were more babies...

And now for something a little bit easier!

After my battle with the great plated lizard, my next species to do was to be a blue spiny lizard... but that had a specific 'scale' design and I just couldn't face another exacting paint job so soon. So looking on my 'to do' list, the next animal was a panther chameleon... patterned - yes... but with a little leeway on precision.

We had a Bank Holiday this week so I wasn't in work on Monday.

Tuesday 7th

When I got in this morning the first thing I noticed was that scaffolding was going up at the Round Aviary. I can just see this aviary through the bamboo stand just outside one of the windows of the studio. Work had been scheduled on this aviary as it is being changed from three partitioned enclosures into two and some renovating work will be done in the process; particularly on the old roof which was in need of repair. With all this going on the birds that had been in there would have been moved out into other aviaries either on or off show. After ringing Nigel (Curator of Birds) to see what ID's needed to be changed, taken down or added elsewhere, I popped out to make the adjustments to the signs on several aviaries.

Back in the studio I started on the chameleon. I had already done the drawing and had put a background on a piece of watercolour paper previously. Now all I had to do was paint the animal; I just hoped my feeling that this would be easier than the last one didn't prove wrong. After all, I thought the plated lizard would be fairly straightforward... it was just a series of square shapes after all! How wrong I was there!

I transferred the drawing onto the background and blocked the animal shape in with a base coat. The texture of a chameleon's skin is lots of little bumps... so I basically painted in the colours and pattern of the  animal with lots of little dots. I kept an eye on the general configuration of the bump pattern on different parts of the body and replicated that generally. By the end of the day I had got the body done and was quite pleased with the progress.

During the day, for an 'eye break' I went over to the Flamingo Paddock to check on Mister Ruff.... still no sign of ruff development. Nigel had emailed me to say he thought this may be due to there being no females in with him... but he would check to see if any other observations had been made of a similar situation. I did a bit of a google search and was interested to read that ruff are the only birds that have three male strategies for breeding. From what I read, on various specialist sites, it appears that there are three types of males, territorial, non territorial and sneaks or faeders. The dominant males hold territories of leks to entice females onto, the non breeding males come and go as 'satellites' around these leks, looking for opportunities to breed and then the sneaks are basically female impersonators having plumage similar to females and therefore being able to move mostly unchallenged amongst the females and sneaking in a mating when the dominant males are too busy to notice. Research indicates that these positions are born into and cannot change and their ruff colouration coincides with their relative position. Darker ruffs tend to be on dominant territorial males and paler/white ruffs on the satellite males with the faeders not having a ruff at all. But no specific answer to my question about why this male has not developed a ruff, other than a description of non-breeding male colouration. Maybe developing a ruff, for an adult male of breeding age, isn't automatic and it requires a trigger.

Whilst I was out and about I took a few photo's, as it was a gorgeous day weather-wise.

The little egrets were up in their nesting tree, displaying and standing over their stick platforms

Something I hadn't done in a long while was to watch the squirrel monkeys. They are on an island on the lake in the centre of the zoo. This island is crammed with trees shrubs and bushes surrounding their wooden hut. The biggest tree is huge, stretching high above the lake and the squirrel monkeys can go right to the top. They were very active in the trees and standing in a little bay by the meerkats you get a good view at the 'back' of their island. I stood here and watched them running around the tree boughs and crossing from one tree to the next, high up and then scrambling down using the ropes and poles put up to help them access as much of the trees as possible.

This one was high up in the middle part of the biggest tree, peering down at all the activity going on below.

This is Samuel, our male agile gibbon, he's such a handsome lad; he was sat watching the female, Duanne, beneath as she foraged on the floor of their island. They have a huge man-made frame work of poles of varying sizes and ropes to brachiate (swing by their arms) around on. He had just come out of their house and had swung with ease across the ropes from the hut to the framework and then on up through all the ropes and poles, until he came to stop at this point. He glanced down at me before resuming his watch on Duanne and taking in a general glance from his high position around the zoo. I find it frustrating and sad that when some people look at primates and see their downward turned mouths that they assume that is an expression of unhappiness, just like with a human. Most primates have naturally downward turned mouths when their faces are relaxed; they don't smile like us. In fact, a big grin can mean distress or fear for some primates, so we shouldn't assume their facial expressions mean the same as ours. 

Wednesday 8th

Back to painting the chameleon for most of the day. Just his tail, legs and head to do today, which I am soooooo relieved and pleased to say went smoothly and satisfactorily. I managed to get him finished, but he has yet to be checked by Tim (Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians); I'll contact Tim next week. 

I had my six month assessment today, which is a follow up to the annual main assessments we have each year in the Autumn. As a result of that chat with my boss, Phil (Graphic Design Manager), I will be recording the pattern of ID request submissions. I already record what species I do and have records of this going back to when I started the job in 1995, so this is a handy additional record to make. This is purely to see if there is a general pattern of submissions and when if any groupings occur and the impact that has. This could help me manage the 'to do' list and improve my performance. I went through my email records, ID file records and my species lists to start compiling a list dating from 2010 to present. I have yet to present this information in a table/graph form. When this has been done over a number of years we should be able to see the impact new developments/new staff/animal section changes/my part-time timetable etc has and keep a better eye on the timespan between the request coming in and when the illustration is done.

This week has been short, easy and a lot less stressful. Just what I needed after the last two and that darned plated lizard... will I ever forgive it and be able to look at the sign/animal without having flashbacks of the battle I had!

Great plated lizard... put to bed

Monday 29th

As I walked in to work this morning, from the local train station, I had a feeling of dread creeping up on me.... how were me and the lizard going to get along this week. I wanted him finished and out of the way, but I still had the tail to do and after the trouble I had with the body last week I can't say I was looking forward to carrying on with it. Still... it had to be done so... just push on with the paint and brushes. Grit your teeth girl!

I was painting that darned lizard's tail all day.... My eyes just kept getting lost on both my illustration and the photographic references in all the lines and squares. In the end I used strips of paper to 'keep my place' on the photo and painting; it helped stop my eyes from getting confused. Wish I had thought of this last week!

I found that I wasn't happy with the plate pattern I had, as the plates kept 'going the wrong way'. So I ended up repainting the pattern by first painting out several 'bands' at a time and using the strips of paper doing one vertical 'set' at a time (rather than going horizontally as I was last week on the body) This worked better and despite several repaints and retries I eventually began making progress down the tail.

The confusion was added to on the tail as the lines of plates 'merged' at three different points on the half of the tail nearest the body. Getting these merges to work well was a fiddle, but perseverance got me there in the end.

It really felt like a 'Tah Dah' moment when I finished the tail... I sat back on my chair, stretched and gave a cheer. It was such a relief to have got that bit done and just in time before it was time to go home. I have just the two legs to do tomorrow and that would be it.... completed. 

Tuesday 30th

In comparison, this morning I came in all eager... today I would finish this lizard and hopefully once checked, would be able to get the painting scanned in, sign done and out of my sight!

 I worked on the legs in the morning and they were relatively easy compared to the rest of him. And then it was done... finito. Now fingers crossed (with a sense of fear) that Tim would not turn round and say I had got it wrong.

I contacted Tim (Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians) and arranged to pop across to his office to get the painting checked by him. He had not long come back from the conference where he did the presentation he was working on when I last saw him. He gave the lizard the ok and after a few mins chat, just as I was about to go he dropped in casually that it was a shame that the great plated lizards were going next week. My heart stopped. 'What?!' I almost choked. 'Well.. we might keep them til maybe July.' He grinned.... he was pulling my leg! I'm not kidding, my heart was racing... just the thought of going through all that anguish with that painting and then being told they were no longer going to be on show ...well I felt crushed, dismayed - totally disheartened.. until I realised he was joking. I saw the funny side though, and it was just what I needed after the intensity of the job. It was a few minutes before my heart slowed down...  it was just such a dreadful thought.

Back in the studio I scanned the illustration and had to extended the width a little to get it to fit the oblong format better. I did this in Photoshop by enlarging the canvas width and cloning the rocks to the right of the image. This was done by lunchtime.

After lunch I printed it out and also changed the wording on the Roti Island snake neck turtle ID text. Tim had queried the text that had been done by Education... it had said we were hoping to breed the species, when in actual fact we had already bred them.. so that needed correcting. I reprinted the text as two versions, as I did before, one for adults and one for juveniles as there will be two displays of this species.

After trimming them to size, the signs were laminated and ready to go up to the animal section.

Later in the afternoon I helped Anna,(Graphic Designer) change the wording on a pointer sign. She had done the rest herself (Maintenance had taken down most of the pointer signs for her to do in the studio) but two needed to be done in situ where she needed assistance with work steps (health & Safety - we're not to use steps on our own). We went up to the Maintenance workshop to get a set of steps, but they were in a meeting, which would be finished in 5-10 mins. So Anna and I sat on a bench outside of the building in the sun whilst we waited. It was so nice to sit in the very warm sun, seems a very long time since it has been nice enough to do that. It's certainly the first time this year I have actually sat in the sun for a few mins, hopefully it won't be another wet summer and there will be plenty more opportunities 'to soak up some rays'. All too soon the 5 mins were up and we were able to get our steps. The first pointer sign was in a tricky position in a sloping flower bed with a medium sized bush at the base of the pole. After trying several different angles to get the steps in, we gave up. We just couldn't get it near enough or stable enough to get up to the sign safely. The next one was successful... Anna had to hand pick the vinyl lettering off saying 'Explorer's Creek' and stick on the ready cut letters spelling 'Feed the Lorikeets'. I stood on the base of the steps to 'anchor' them.

On our way back from dropping the steps back up to Maintenance, I noticed the shadows cast by the silver birches on the canopy of the outside eating area of the Coral Cafe.

I love it when the sun is out and casts these shadows... it is very striking - like a huge piece of living art.

For the last part of the day I worked at the computer, backing up some of my ID files to the zoo's server.

Wednesday 1st May

I started the background for the panther chameleon this morning. After some thought on what approach and colours I should use, I opted for yellowish greens in a nondescript wash. The chameleon is green but bluish green... and I wanted greens to reflect the leafy aboreal habitat of this species, but in tones that would not confuse too much with the animal. I was quite excited as today I get to use my new paper, that I ordered last month. Up until now I have been using a pack of 300grms Not watercolour paper, which has a slight texture to it. My new paper is Hot Press 300grms watercolour, which has a very smooth surface, no texture. I am hoping this will help eliminate the slight colour variations I sometimes get when scanning.. particularly large areas of one colour... like the black backgrounds of the fish illustrations. Whilst I waited for the paint to dry I nipped over to the Flamingo Paddock to check on the Ruff to see if he has started changing to his breeding plumage yet. For the last two years the males have changed sufficiently enough around mid April to warrant the change over of ID's to the one that shows the males with their showy ruffs of their breeding plumage. However my check shows that the one male bird we have left is not noticeably changing his plumage as yet. I am curious about this... is the lateness or lack of change to breeding plumage due to the long cold Spring we have had so far or the fact that he is alone with no other males or females or is there another reason?

The Asiatic lion cubs are just by the flamingo paddock and I could see they were out and playing around, so I went to have a look. One was sat in the sun near to the front of the glass and he was playing with his tail... just had to video his antics. So endearing.

 

Back in the studio I completed my backing up on the computer and to make some room on the harddrive and server I burnt, to DVD, some of the ID documents that had been filed away as they were no longer needed. These are the old Quark, Freehand and Indesign documents that have since been redone in Illustrator. I also thinned out some of my reference photo's of species that I have done and added the rest to the DVD to be burnt; freeing up some valuable space.

After lunch I went out for my sketch time. For a number of years I have had my eye on the Fritillaria imperialis... two plants of this species grow near the round aviary and they are one of my favourite blooms.

Today I really fancied drawing them.. the weather is warm and sunny and at the moment there are not huge crowds around... perfect for sitting in the pathway to draw them.

After doing them I wandered around for more subject matter, but most of the flowers I fancied drawing were in a place where I would be in the way to sit and draw for any length of time. So I wandered around for a bit. I noticed the arabis growing on the bank leading into Seal and Penguin Coast... beautiful colours.

Eventually I settled down round in the viewing bay looking across to the Gorilla Island. It is tucked out of the way and quite often gets overlooked by the visitors as it looks onto the 'back' of the island. I sat and watched the gorillas, sketching them... but didn't get on very well. This was about the only successful sketch I managed.. the rest were just one or two abandoned lines.

However little Kukena was very entertaining. He's quite a little adventurer now, although Mum, Salome, still likes him to stay close.

One of the young females climbed the tree in front of me and sat in the boughs at the top, munching on the bamboo leaves she had taken up with her and then just lying in the crook of the boughs enjoying the peace and quiet and sun perhaps.

It was an enjoyable hour or so watching them all... Romina walking around with a piece of cloth around her neck, Kukena exploring and investigating, Salome tucking herself away in the outside shelter to munch on some of the browse left out by the keepers and Jock striding around commandingly in the background. I was enjoying it so much I forgot the time and stayed there later than planned, as I wanted to get back to the studio to upload the photo's and clear up my desk etc before going home.

I'll end this week's post with a photo of Kukena.