Several outdoor cages run alongside the Bronx Zoo’s Mouse House, now occupied by New World Monkeys, since the closure of the old Monkey House. You can see tamarins, marmosets, and titis, but beware that the signs are not always correct. The keepers seem to move these animals into cages as needed, without changing the signs.

This little guy is a Silvery Marmoset, Mico argentatus, that lives in the eastern Amazonian rain forest of Brazil. “My what big ears you have.”

As can be expected, photographing animals through cage bars is tricky. My first attempts, using a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX200V camera’s auto-focus, ended up focusing on the bars. Ugh. Then I tried the manual focus, but monkeys move around too fast for that. The best method seems to be to reach forward, holding the camera lens as close to the bars as possible, with the subject monkeys several feet away. Then the auto-focus picks them out nicely. This worked even better with my new Nikon D5100.

The Silvery Marmoset in the photo above shows off his large canine teeth, a typical feature of primates, even small ones like this guy.

• marmosets,
• primates,
• zoos