A few miles north of San Antonio you’ll find Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch, a drive-through wildlife preserve of herbivores. The Wife and I drove out there last weekend to try out my new Nikkor 300mm f/2.8 lens. As it turned out, the animals were way too close for such a long lens.
Part of the entrance fee gets you a bag of feed for the critters, which draws the hungry ones right up to your vehicle. In fact, we even had an ostrich stick its head a foot or two into the Chevy. That’s something that doesn’t happen every day.
I’d recommend doing at least a couple of loops of the park, as the selection of animals can be quite different just a few minutes later. On our second pass, a large herd of zebras was accosting each vehicle for food. You aren’t supposed to feed them by hand, but they were so aggressive that you didn’t really have the opportunity to drop the food.
Technical Notes: All images were taken with my Nikon D200 handheld. Most were with the AF-S Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 G, but I used the 70mm-200mm f/2.8 on a handful of pictures.
You are not telling the whole story of the Ostrich sticking his head in the car. It was actually trying to kill me!
I am just being dramatic but at the moment it was actually frightening. He kept sticking his head in my window and was making these pecking moves with his head and beak. I thought he was making high pitched squawking noises but in retrospect I think that was me. Brian was trying to give him the food he so desperately wanted but ending up either throwing it in my lap or out the window before the Ostrich could get it. We eventually had to start slowly driving forward to get him out of the car.
My life will never be the same…