“Lazy Days”

"Lazy Day's"  is a short photo story from a day spent at the Wild Animal Sanctuary, Keenesburg, Colorado.  The site at Keensburg is nearly 800 acres and is open to the public where, via 1.5 miles of aerial walk way, visitors can view rescued wild animals with minimal disturbance to the animals.

The Sanctuary is a totally self funded charity relying purely on donations.  It also runs a seperate refuge area of over 9000 acres which is not open to the public.  The rescue programme is impressive by its scale, its attention to detail, the desire to put the animals first and also through its volunteer workforce which underpin it.  These volunteers are on hand throughout the facility at Keenesburg to answer any questions, provide anecdotes about the animals and also to provide detail on some of the harrowing tales that preceeded an individual animal being rescued and brought to the sanctuary.

All the images on this page were shot from the walkways and for that reason they are not captured at eye level with the animals which is what I usually try to achieve when shooting wildlife back in Scotland.  However the lay out of the sanctuary does afford some great opportunities for photographs. As with all wildlife photography it is a matter of being patient, looking for compositions and remaining aware to different possibilities.  When we first arrived many of the animals were just chilling in the middle of the day so I thought it was appropriate to capture some of this across the various species; hence the title of the blog.

The blog features jaguar, tree foxes, wolves, lions, syrian bears, tigers and serval and is representative of only some of the animals housed within the sanctuary.

Click on any image to view a larger version.

To visit the Wild Animal Sanctuary website click here to learn more about their great work.