The Calgary Zoo yesterday, somewhere I haven’t been in years. The grounds feel smaller now, but the animals are impressive, and we got lucky with many out in the open. Amongst others:

• Extraordinary penguin exhibit – lots of them, very active, and multiple locations indoors and out. (I wish I’d gotten some photos, but was holding coffee at the time.)
• Cougars jumping, climbing, and very lively. (The polar opposite of the snow leopards.)
• A gorilla couple with a young baby that attached itself to the mother’s arm as she roamed.
• Two Komodo dragons, with one hanging out right in the open a few feet from the glass.
• A pack of wolves circling energetically within inches of the observation perch.
• A troupe of Japanese macaques, which I haven’t seen since visiting Japan. (Too bad there wasn’t an onsen.)
• An enormous Malayan tapir.
• The biggest Bactrian (two hump) camel any of us had ever seen. What a beast.

Although not as cold as last week (-30C), it was chilly out (-3C), and I’ve never been so thankful to for the butterfly conservatory’s hot, humid interior (currently minus the butterflies for the winter season) for recharging body temperature.

I played around with exporting some iOS live photos and running them through ffmpeg to make some VP9/.webm shorts. It worked reasonably well, despite the idiosyncrasies of the <video> tag.