There is no zoom-lens trickery involved here. Thanks to Indy Zoo's new tiger exhibit, which has a 1.5" pane of glass separating you from Shere Khan, you can get right up close. I waited for a hole in the wall of kiddies and dropped to my knee to get eye-to-eye with P. tigris.
Of course, there are little pink hairless monkeys lining the walls of the viewing area, and el tigre's pacing the glass like Huck presented with a bell jar full of squirrels, hence the difficulty in getting a crisply-focused pic...
I'm going back on a weekday when I can spend more time trying to get a good shot. (Er, with the camera, not the .405 Win T/C Encore...)
Did Shere Khan speak with the voice of George Sanders?
ReplyDeleteSomehow I don't think the zookeepers would be amused if you showed up dressed for a safari and toting your rifle. :-D
ReplyDeleteBummer. The zoo is one of the best places to hunt.
ReplyDeleteAnd Matt G. even has a new pith helmet to loan you!
On a serious note. When you go back use manual focus. depending on your auto focus system, it may be focusing on the surface of the glass instead of the tiger.
ReplyDeletepretty. Would be nice to have a better picture, too, will look forward to it.
ReplyDeleteStill: your hands itch for the 405, don't they? Do you feel the little churn in the gut, thinking about what it would be like if the glass werent there? Do you ask yourself, can I make that one and only shot in a moment of abject terror, and make it count? Do you find yourself wanting to know?
Naaah. Me neither.
Why, Og, whyever would you think that? ;)
ReplyDeleteBeautiful
ReplyDelete"Kenyaaaa, come to Kenyaaa...." as I remember was an earworm you posted a link to some time ago...at least, I THINK it was here....
ReplyDeletelol.
ReplyDeleteWhile the idea of killing something that can kill me back is one of the driving forces in my life, I prefer things I can eat- carnivoires just aren't on my diet. Now, give me a cape buffalo, or a rhino, or a hippo, I'm in. Hell, elephants foot soup is supposed to be unspeakably toothsome.
I would eat it, if only to gain its courage. Its rich, tasty courage... yum!
ReplyDeleteTam,
ReplyDeleteYou might want to read, "The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival" by John Vaillant.
Mweh, I dislike cats but not enough to chow down on one. On the other hand, a Cape will back down a pride of lions or a pack of hyenas. And their liver is the size of a basketball.
ReplyDeleteMmmmm. Basketball.
I wonder if the tiger on the other side of the glass is walking by, looking through the glass... just like we do at the deli... hmmmm... what looks good for lunch...
ReplyDeleteDann in Ohio
.405 is a little light in my book for such an animal.
ReplyDeleteI'm in for something in .45 or up, preferably well up.
That's not close, this is close: http://i1084.photobucket.com/albums/j412/Kaerius/bellyrub.jpg
ReplyDelete(A vacation photo of mine)
Leave the T/C at home, maybe take a Hornet or a Swift, something in a varmint cal.
ReplyDeleteAnd don't mess with El Tigre, focus on those pink hairless monkeys. No, not the little ones, these ones:
http://specials.msn.com/A-List/Lifestyle/PETA-to-launch-raunchy-porn-site.aspx?cp-documentid=30175855
They say you can't even go to the zoo. So they need to go. And all the shooty noise, blood, and exploding silicon baggies should help clear out the other obstructions, allowing a nice clear shot of that big ol' housecat...with the camera, not the gun (a Hornet would just piss him off anyway).
AT
I believe, Joseph, you're thinking of this Weebl animation (live version here).
ReplyDeleteWV cherrim: one of the lesser-known types of angels.
The 405 is a perfectly respectable big game cartridge. Shot placement under stress is the key.
ReplyDeleteWDM bell killed thousands of elephants with a 7mm mauser, taking a shot at spitting distance, and then scrambling up on the elephant's head to use it as a firing platform to kill other elephants. Hell, people still shoot rhinos with 9's.
I think he did most of his Jumbo-whacking with a pair of .303 Enfields and FMJ ammo, but he did indeed use a 7mm for a bunch.
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere that someone considered him sort-of responsible for the deaths of about a hundred hunters who tried to do the same thing, but weren't as good a shot as he
200 elephants with the 303. Over 1000 with the 275 Rigby (7x57 mauser)
ReplyDeleteif you haven't read "Karamojo Safari, you owe it to yourself to do so. Not available for Kindle yet, as far as I know.
The yaw-resistant almost-cylindrical military solids of the day would penetrate for weeks, which helped.
ReplyDelete(...only tangentially-related, I am reminded of a guy on TFL some ten years back whose sigline read something like "With the proper heavy hard-cast bullet, .357 Mag, .41 Mag, .44 Mag, .45 Colt, .454 Casull, .475 Linebaugh, and .500 Linebaugh will all shoot clean through a bison. To determine which one to use, decide how much recoil you can tolerate and how big a hole you'd like to shoot through the bison."
He also used a 6.5x54 MchSch with 160grn solids as well.
ReplyDeleteAmbulance Driver said...
ReplyDelete"Bummer. The zoo is one of the best places to hunt."
A certain cougar that used to hang around Northwest Trek (a fenced-in wildlife compound on the way to Mt. Rainier in WA State) would agree with you. It used to hop the fence, bag itself a meal, and split after chowing down. So convenient to have all those tasty game animals all fenced in like that, don't you know.
BoxStockRacer
Speaking of hunting, here's the other way around:
ReplyDeleteBaby deer escapes Lions at the National Zoo part 2
I find it a bit odd everyone came to the zoo to see nature, and yet ends up cheering for the Disney PG-13 version.
I was rooting for the great cat. It's too bad that the zoo keepers can't arrange for this to happen a bit more often. There's hoofed-rats a-plenty in Rock Creek Park.