Limited Access Visit #1: the Bronx Zoo
A great thing that’s happening in New York is that our cultural institutions are reopening. A “great” thing about the pandemic is they’re all reopening with limited access and you have to make a reservation ahead of time. It is very nice to walk around popular places without very many people (or school groups!) in them at all.
My first such visit was to the Bronx Zoo, which I had never even been to before, a few Wednesdays ago. Wednesdays are free days at the Bronx Zoo. It was a perfect storm of planning ahead.
Here are a bunch of pictures of animals. Almost all of these pictures were taken with the new used 90mm lens I got for my M. It’s a f/2.8 and at first I wondered if I wouldn’t want more speed than that, but now that I’ve been using it the thought of trying to focus a 90mm lens at f/2.0 or below is, nope! Not interested!
The Fordham Road gate is the classy way to enter the Bronx Zoo, which turned out to be: Very Big. There’s a lot of walking between animals. I think that, for standard zoo-visiting, I prefer a more compact zoo. I like to be looking at penguins and then I turn around and I’m looking at tigers.
Ok, now, presented with limited interruptions, animals, statues and buildings:
A thing that was a real drag about the zoo was that so many exhibits cost extra money to see. Monkey house, butterfly house, jungle house and more. I did shell out to ride the Bengali Express Monorail through Asia because I can’t resist a monorail (or a chance to sit down). An odd thing about the monorail is it turns about just about every animal you see way far away on the monorail s also available to be seen close up in a exhibit. But still. Sitting. In a monorail.
Aaaand here is Linus’s son, Chestnut, up close in a normal exhibit.
Now I was about to leave when I saw there was about no line to get into the Madagascar exhibit (which, for some reason, didn’t cost extra money) so I decided to check it out and I’m so glad I did because they had great lemurs, tortoises, and red birds in there!
And after that I left the zoo through the 183rd street gate which is not as classic looking as the Fordham Road gate. Also of note: I walked to the zoo, walked around the zoo, and walked home from the zoo…it was a 26,000 step outing!
