Dilemma

A dilemma when you're in the Butterfly House at Whipsnade Zoo and a butterfly lands on your camera. What do you do?

I have had a lovely but exhausting day. It is my friend, Mary's, birthday and we celebrated with a day at the zoo plus a rather good picnic. We were one of the first cars into the zoo and one of the last to leave so we made the most of the time.

The Butterfly House was early on in the day although we returned later.  It is a first class addition to the zoo with some amazing specimens just flying around the visitors.  This one landed on my camera.  It stayed still for ages and, whilst I clearly could not use my Nikon, I carefully reached into my camera bag, took out my mobile, managed to get it into camera mode and took a pretty-well-in-focus image - all one handed. 

A very exciting part of the day was watching the elephants on the walkabout.  It's only the females who are allowed to do this as it involves close proximity to the public (an unpredictable species) whilst the male elephants are left safely in their paddock.  At one stage the oldest female did get spooked by something but the keepers were quickly on the case and calmed her down.

At the end of the walk the elephants were put into an arena area where they could be observed close to - there is a concrete seating area around part of the paddock. Although the keepers were always watching closely and keeping them back, the elephants liked to come close to the fence and at one stage an elephant was so close to me, reaching out her trunk for some grass.  I so wanted to touch this magnificent creature but the keeper said 'No' - I would have ended up on one of the stone steps very rapidly which probably wouldn't have done me or my camera any good at all!  An extra photo shows the elephant's trunk and you can see why there was a temptation to touch it.

A brilliant day -and I completely forgot about Wide Angle Wednesday. Sorry.  Actually, what is the theme today and who is the host for August?