Tag Archives: Denver zoo

Day Sleeper

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2016-01-12Dazma1841

If you’ve ever done door to door sales you may have run across a sign in the window or taped to the door that says “Day Sleeper – Do Not Disturb”. This sign has been put there because the occupant is a shift worker and works the night shift. 11:00pm to 7:00am in the morning. This is a tough shift to work as it turns your life completely up side down.

They are usually ready for supper when they get off work at seven am, lunch for them was about 2 or 3 in the morning. Then they have to do what ever needs to be done during the day so they can go to bed around 1 to 2 in the afternoon. It’s hard to sleep in the daytime even if you’re in a completely dark room. Noise creeps in, sirens, kids playing, traffic noises, you just don’t sleep well. This leads to sleep deprivation and very soon you are one very cranky individual.

 You’ve unplugged the phone, done everything you can think of to try to sleep and then the worst happens. Someone knocks on your door. Once, twice, sometimes more, until you get up to see who it is and you find a salesman standing there. One  with a terrific price on a vacuum cleaner or a set of encyclopedias. Or it’s some self-righteous person who is desperately certain that your soul needs saving and if you’d just let them come in they would help you find Jesus.

You no longer ask “Didn’t you see the sign?”. You already know that they think their agenda is more important than your sleep. So you casually pull them into your cave and dismember them. This normally takes a good 1 to 2 hours, so right there you’re that far behind when you try to go back to sleep.

This is Dazma the Amur leopard who lives at the Denver zoo. She is a day sleeper. Wake her at your own peril.

Animal Portraits: Dazma the Amur Leopard

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AmurLeopard1798Amur 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.