It’s been a while since I posted a gorilla shot. Just came across this one of a young male taking a bite out of his friend’s head. Some day, one of these guys might end up the dominant male silver back of his own troop. This was in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of Uganda.
It gets very hot in the Kalahari desert in the middle of the day. This is when every creature seems to be looking for a place to cool off. In this particular photo, an oryx finds relief in the shade of an acacia tree.
Last week I posted a photo of an oxpecker pecking in a zebra’s ear. This week it’s two oxpeckers climbing up the mountainous back of a giraffe. There were actually quite a few more of these small birds on the giraffe, and at one point I saw a flock of about 30 of them on another giraffe. The giraffes don’t seem to mind much (after all, they are getting rid of all their ticks) but a couple of times I saw a giraffe clearly annoyed by the parasitic birds.
Tule elk are the smallest subspecies of elk in North America. They live only in a few small pockets of California. One of the most reliable places to see them is at Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. It was getting near the end of the day when I came across a small herd of females, including this young lady who was obviously reacting to a particularly funny joke that I told her.
Here’s another one from the late spring trip to Yellowstone — this one not looking quite so springlike. I had never seen so many grizzly bears in the park. They seemed to be everywhere, digging through the snow looking for food. I watched this guy as he walked for about 15 minutes along the river and then proceeded to swim across and climb up the mountain on the other side.
The northwest entrance to Yellowstone National Park is a great place to spot bighorn sheep. The vast majority of Yellowstone is in Wyoming, but Gardiner Canyon where I took this photo is in Montana (the park’s boundaries also spill into a bit of eastern Idaho). I was there this spring and several recently born bighorn lambs were running up and down the steep walls of the canyon. It’s amazing how fearless they are at such a young age.
When I was in Brazil last year, I spent half a day scaling the side of a cliff, following my guide to the nesting site of green-winged macaws. Not much materialized as we waited patiently on top of the cliff for the birds to return home for the night. Finally, we saw this lone pair flying well below us in the valley. Not exactly the photo opportunity I was expecting but pretty cool to watch as they glided above the tree tops Green-winged macaws — also known as red and green macaws — are the largest of the macaws and they range throughout northern and central South America. Once fairly common, they are now faced with rapidly declining numbers due to habitat loss and illegal capture to the parrot trade.
Here’s a landing sequence of a razorbill on Machias Seal Island off the coast of Maine. These birds are the largest members of the auk family and they will only come ashore in order to breed. Presumably, razorbills choose only one partner for life, and females lay only one egg per year. These shots were taken earlier this year when I went up to Maine to photograph Atlantic puffins — a species that the razorbills nest along side of.
Oxpeckers can be found on most of the large mammals of sub-Sahara Africa including elephants, rhinos, giraffes, buffalo, and in this case, zebras. They mostly eat ticks off the backs of their hosts, but sometimes they move in for a delicious bite of earwax. This zebra/oxpecker combo were photographed early one morning in the Okavango Delta of Botswana.
Some of you might remember these guys — the indri indri lemurs (and no, that’s not a typo, indri is repeated in the offical name). They are the largest of all the lemurs at nearly four feet tall, and 21 pounds. Even so, they can be incredibly acrobatic while jumping from tree to tree. As you can see from this guy, they also look a bit like stuffed animals.