Amur Leopard                                        click to enlarge

After finally receiving a day that did not have snow, high winds or general suckiness of an undetermined nature, where the sun was shining and you didn’t have to bundle up in your Michelin man snowsuit and it felt good just to be alive, it was time for a little road trip. It had been years since I had been to a zoo, preferring to photograph my animals in their natural unconfined habitat but beggars and those on limited time schedules can’t be choosers.

So where can you go where you can see and photograph a multiple of different animals, walk miles in a small space, eat a boiled hot dog and be home at night to sleep in your own bed. That’s right, the zoo.

Now regardless of your own personal feelings about zoos without them we’d be out of some of these animals. There are thought to be less than 50 of these leopards in the wild and they are dwindling fast. Through the breeding programs established by the various zoos in the country and the world there are now 96 more.

I’m not here to enter into that zoo’s good, zoo’s bad debate. What I am here to do is talk about and show the absolute beauty and majesty of these incredibly rare animals. More show really than talk because words begin to fail me when I try to describe the feeling of connecting with one of these individuals. Perhaps in a better world we wouldn’t have to visit one in a zoo but we don’t have a better world at the moment. What we have is a species that is coming back from that absolute abyss of extinction and the thought of never being able to see one again is unacceptable to me.

This is Dazma, a female Amur leopard currently residing at the Denver Zoo.