The return of everybody’s favorite giant rodents. These guys are very common along riverbanks throughout South America. In this case, I was in the Pantanal of Brazil. Typically capybaras weigh roughly 160 pounds, but there have been a few recorded cases of individuals hitting the scales in excess of 230 pounds.
While I was sitting inside a makeshift blind waiting for honey badgers to arrive, several birds stopped by, allowing me very tight portraits. This one is a southern yellow hornbill. I previously posted a shot of this guy looking directly at camera. Here’s one that gives a good look at the beak and facial feathers.
Borneo is home to one of the oldest rainforests in the world — even older than the Amazon. Hiking through the jungle there was quite an experience — and although I almost exclusively point my camera at animals, I couldn’t help but grab a few shots of plants in between orangutan sightings. I’m not sure of the exact species of this palm, but its fronds were big — six feet wide, or so, big.
The caju fruit is like the apple of northeast Brazil. It also happens to be the fruit that cashews come from — and that tufted capuchin monkeys love. This female capuchin was squeezing all the juice that she possibly could out of a caju fruit. It was dripping all over the place as she happily lapped it up.
I already posted one shot of this red lechwe dashing through the flooded savanna of the Okavango Delta. Here’s another. Red lechwes spend most of their time in the water eating aquatic plants. Their legs are covered in a water repelling substance allowing them to run quite fast in knee deep water. The water and tall grass also provide protection from predators.
At about this time every year, thousands of snow geese and sandhill cranes descend upon Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. It’s quite a spectacle seeing giant flocks take off en masse every morning at dawn. It’s also nice to witness the quieter moments — like the morning I photographed these two cranes wading in a shallow lake.
This is a green-crested lizard from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It appears to be focused on something above, perhaps a butterfly or moth, its most common prey.
This sexy beast is a thee-toed sloth. It graced my presence in a place called Pavones in south western Costa Rica, not too far from the Panama border. Sloths move so slow that algae easily grows on their fur (moths also like to live in there). The algae shares a symbiotic relationship with the sloth — the sloth providing a home for the algae and the algae providing camouflage for the sloth.
These marmosets are small. Very small. Like squirrel small. They are a somewhat rare primate from northern Brazil, but gained a bit of popularity in the animated feature film Rio. I like to think that I knew them before the movie came out.
I was just finishing breakfast when I saw these two polar bears through the dining room window of the lodge. I quickly grabbed my equipment and hustled on out to a side patio to record the action. Turns out I could have taken my time as they kept at it for a good 20 minutes or so. They were obviously play fighting on the ice, but at times it really did look like they were out on a giant dance floor.