Birch beauty

We visited the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig today but the day was very dull and the light hopeless. I tried upping the ISO but that made the pictures very noisy - I got very few good animal pictures.

I finally plumped for this lovely birch instead, though a European elk seems to have photobombed the picture!

We had a very good talk by a Finnish girl named Hanna who was feeding the wildcats, or what passes for wildcats these days. They must be 75% wildcat according to DNA tests before they're admitted to the collection. Any animals over that percentage are kept on their own and away from the 75%-ers. She was very outspoken about the need to keep all our pet moggies indoors at all times, but I fear that this will be impossible to achieve - nobody will want to do that. She advocated putting a birch tree in the living room and hanging dead rabbits from it to keep the cats occupied - I think living habits in Finland must be different from ours!