Three views of a caracal

One Metro Zoo employee described these guys as "keeper-aware", so one can almost always see them. (One could even, in wild fits of optimism, imagine that they are after ear-scritching and general petting as much as chow; they seem remarkably like large house cats in most respects.)

The downside of their reliability of display in the enclosure is that the big sheet of plexiglass one is expected to look through is covered with ground-ape nose prints and paw smudges. It's also bent, I think as an inevitable side effect of a metal frame in the cold, so it's fairly comprehensively optically unhelpful.
Also optically unhelpful are the diverse bits of (currently dead) vegetation, but fortunately these can generally be focused past. (And being dead, they more or less fit with the caracal colour scheme, which is handy.)
None of which saves me from the framing difficulties here; should have backed up or reduced the zoom, so as to get all of the ears in the frame.
The facial expressions are pretty good, though. It was a bright sunny day and I think that was being appreciated.
Here we have the whole creature, complete with decidedly Dr. Seussian ears and an interesting dappling of shadow.