I was completely stumped by this week's Gallery prompt of Mother Nature. It's not really a time of year to be out a lot with your camera and anyway, I am not one of the world's nature photographers. I don't have many pictures to fall back on, so had resigned myself to giving this week a miss.
And then, Garry from The Blog Up North published this forlorn picture. And it prompted a memory of a trip to the zoo of our own, admittedly completely different and somewhat lighter in mood. It's a bit of a cheat for the prompt, but I know there are often different interpretations. So shoot me.
Last May, I took the children to Blackpool Zoo on Spring Bank Holiday Monday. It was their first ever trip to a proper zoo although we'd taken them to a marine park in Portugal the year before. As my husband was working in the morning, the children and I did most of the trip on our own, wandering back and forth around the zoo, stopping and starting at random, allowing for loo stops, sandwich consumption, ice cream purchases, and chasing of birds. I forgot my camera in the rush to get myself, children and packed lunch ready but I did have my phone with me.
Monkey and Missy Woo loved seeing all the animals. There was, however, particular excitement when we found where the meerkats were housed. Maybe it's those ads, although I do have a recollection of Monkey saying he'd seen some at school on a DVD they'd played to his class. They couldn't wait to see them, and afterwards, they insisted I take this picture of them.
If my photography skills were halfway decent, you'd see that they were stood in front of a larger than life meerkat cutout. Try saying that without your teeth in.
Do you think they'd pass for the real thing if they snuck into the meerkat enclosure? Would Aleksandr sniff them out as impostors or are meerkats really simples and not notice? What do you reckon?