Folsom City Zoo

The next morning I took a photo of one of the horses in the barn playing with my camera a bit. Barns are typically quite dark, but theirs has these great skylights. Still, it was dark and raining a bit outside so the light here was minimal. I had my 20mm lens on the camera and setting the ISO to a grainy 3200 was able to get the exposure up to 1/60 at f3.8.

Dan and Terry are selling their house in Greenwood. They have not lived their more than 6 years but the area has recently become quite popular among folks so prices have skyrocketed. Not that this would have been influential, but they also found 70 acres of land for sale back down in Cool, closer to work, which was such a good price it could not be passed up. It's absolutely beautiful land and we spent much of the morning hiking around and of course I took lots and lots of photos. There is even a stream running through the property. If I remember correctly it is land which was part of a land grant and was recently split up and sold. Anyway, it is fantastic property which they will be building a new house on, but for the most part preserve the bulk of its wildness and untouched feel.

Sue and I then headed down to the Folsom Zoo. The rain had let up, but the overcast remained. That is a good thing for sun midday is not conductive to good photographs of animals. I had it easy this time. Last year I had a long list of animals to photograph, but this year I only needed to take photos of the rescue horses and their new wolf, River.

The horses live with a couple sheep and some goats so I got some photos of them too. They were quite easy to photograph from the public viewing platform. I just needed to use my 300mm Tamron lens and easily, with patience, got some nice photos. The wolves were a little different because there is no way to get photos of them outside through the fence. However, I used to volunteer at this zoo so Terry gave me permission to go behind the scenes and photograph directly through the fence. The wolf fencing is hog wire which is very heavy welded wire with large holes, plenty big enough for my 80-200mm Nikkor lens and having the fence to rest it on, makes things easy.

Like Animal Ark, Folsom has two female wolves which do not get along. Onyx is the oldest, now nearly 12 years old and this past year they almost lost her to back problems. She had a ruptured disk, but surgery has given her a new lease on life. River is a rescue pup from an illegally kept pair which were allowed to mate and have pups. I have no idea where the rest of the litter went, but River ended up here.

Since he is so young, and they want to make sure he can live with the other two wolves, what they do is time share River with Granite, the alpha male, and Redbud who is Nischa's litter sister. He stays out in the yard, and the other two wolves are rotated with Onyx to be out with him.

River and Onyx are black. River is still a puppy. Aside from a white star on his chest is all black. Onyx is a bit faded with age. Terry said that they have not been able to get good photos of River him being so dark but one nice thing about my digital camera is that it picks up dark things really well and I had no problem getting a LOT of photos of him. I just set the ISO to 800 and shot away. He is also a bit shy which made it a lot easier to take his photo because he would stay back and just look at me.

Although Granite and Redbud were in the holding pens, I somehow lucked out and got a photo of Redbud for the folks back home to see how she looks. I then had fun and made a wolfpaper of the two sisters here out west together using the magic of Photoshop :-)

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