We visited the Mandai Wildlife Reserve’s Night Safari in the evening. It is essentially a dedicated nighttime zoo. Timed entry is used to control crowds, we arrived at 8:15pm. It was obviously pretty dark. There was just enough lighting to be able to see the animals, though not always very clearly. Definitely an interesting and very unique experience! Particularly with the larger animals as generally you’ll never get to see them when its dark outside in a zoo setting.
We tried to photograph as much as we could but telephoto photography in dark conditions requires lenses that we don’t have. It was sufficiently dark that with our equipment pretty much everything had to be photographed with maximum sensor sensitivity (ISO) and manually focused as it was too dark for autofocus.
The results below aren’t great. Some are particularly bad. I didn’t really bother trying to fix color white balance. But they look more or less OK when on a small screen and you can at least generally tell what the subject is!
There is one bird that we couldn’t find in its enclosure but it deserves to be mentioned…
Morepork! Yes, that is the actual name given to this species! Despite it being from Tasmania and New Zealand, both places I’ve been to, I’ve somehow never heard of it before! It’s call is described as sounding like “more pork,” or “roro” in Chinese which translates to “meat meat” in English! Check out the page for this species on eBird, there is a green Listen button on the right that has a sound sample.