The internet is for baby leopard pictures

I'm getting ready to go on a long flight, but I've got a little time, so how about a cat post? These are maybe a little bit bigger cats than you're used to - two Amur leopard cubs we had over the winter of 2012-13, along with their mom.

They really are adorable, and they liked to nap right up against the glass, so I was able to get some very nice closeups. Not much in the way of high-action shots, but lots of little intimate moments, which is nice.

You can start to see some of my prioritization of body parts other than the head, here. And the ones below are very much reflective of that.

I love the closeups and the patterns, but it's this final one from farther away that has been the most popular, largely due to getting a full view of mom and a good sense of the size differential.

It's also the earliest one, with the cub only a couple of months old. The others are four to five months later.

It's interesting with zoo photography, where you get very excited about a baby, and spend a lot of time taking their pictures, and then usually once they grow up you never see them again. The species survival plan takes them to some other zoo in some other city, and there's not as much transparency about that as there could be. I don't have any idea where these leopards are now, which makes me a little bit sad.

I could probably find out who runs the SSP and write them a letter, and they'd probably be happy to tell me. I wish there was a public database of all of them, though. Maybe that's my next nonprofit idea. Build some software that's useful to SSP directors and at the same time allow that data to be accessible by everyone.

Something blockchain might be useful for. I'll have to think about that.