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.
Panther chameleons not only change colors within single individuals, but they also come in different colors depending upon which region of Madagascar they are from. This is a male from the Tamatave area on the east coast where they are predominantly red. I saw him just as the sun was disappearing.
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.