Welcome to April!  It’s time for the A-Z Challenge, an international blogging challenge that’s been going for a few years now.  My theme this year is the A-Z of the Brookfield Zoo, one of my favorite places in the Chicagoland area.  My husband and I went through the zoo with a fine-toothed comb, looking for animals from A-Z.

This lovely gentleman is the Amur Leopard.  He’s endangered in the wild, so we’re lucky to have him – and Brookfield Zoo participates an international Species Survival Plan for many of the animals that are threatened, endangered, or, sadly, extinct in the wild.

He moves around a lot, and my camera was not cooperating with me that day.  But what excited me is the fact that he was down off his perch so I could get a good look at him.

Even though his mouth was open, I couldn’t hear any sounds from him.

I just missed catching his face head-on in this shot, but my auto-focus categorically refused to work with me.  I heard the shot snap just when he turned to go back the other way.

Looks close enough to pet, though, doesn’t he?  There’s actually about six inches of clear Lexan (think bullet-proof glass) between the two of us, so he’s safe from being mauled by overly friendly cat people.

Shame, really.

Will you look at those feet?  Holy retractable claws, Batman.  (Actually I think they can’t retract claws, being big cats?)  He paced for the whole time we watched him, about ten or fifteen minutes.

In this one, he caught sight of a small boy who was making a lot of noise.  From bored to intent, in an instant.

Probably a good thing there’s netting over the entirety of his enclosure, eh?

Stay tuned tomorrow, when we get to see… Bears!