With all the devastation we’ve been seeing and reading about in Japan, I had been wondering about the snow monkeys that I visited two springs ago up near Nagano. Being well away from the coast and up in the mountains, I figured the tsunami wouldn’t have been a factor, but the earthquake did hit the Nagano area, and regions of high thermal activity are always a concern. Thankfully, the live cam that sits above the Jigokudani hot spring (plus a quick google search) indicates that life is going on as usual for the monkeys.
Here’s another of the pine martens that I photographed over the Christmas break in Silver Gate, Montana, just outside of Yellowstone. There were two scurrying around and they were pretty quick, so difficult to photograph. Every now and again, I’d see a head pop up somewhere and then dart away as soon as I put the camera to my eye. In this instance, I was able to get the shot before the pine marten disappeared again.
Time for some random kangaroo facts to enrich everyone’s lives. A female is called a flyer. The males are called either a boomer or a buck. And the young, of course, are called joeys. These two here, a mother red kangaroo and her joey, are in a place called Flinders Ranges National Park in South Australia.
I know I’ve been posting a lot of river otters lately, but I keep finding new ones that I like. The otters work hard at keeping a few holes in the ice open throughout the cold winter. The holes also make it an easy time of year to photograph them because (with only three or four holes in a given lake) you always know where they are going to surface.
This little guy is called a spot flanked poison dart frog. The photograph was taken in Madidi National Park in the Bolivian Amazon. This is a very small frog and I needed my macro setup to get the shot. Other than the name, I really don’t know too much about this frog and not much is written about them online.
Been a while since I posted something from the Pacific northwest, so here’s another look at the ochre sea stars that can be found up and down the coast of Olympic National Park in Washington. These sea stars are predatory, preferring to eat mussels, and they are actually quite important to the healthy diversity of their habitat. In their absence, mussels take over almost completely, crowding out other species. This photo was taken well after the sun had gone down and I needed a 25 second exposure in order to have enough light.
Continuing on last week’s theme of depressing stories from the field, I figured why not one more, this time featuring an elk and pine beetles. Pine beetles are killing trees in Rocky Mountain National Park at an alarming rate. Entire mountainsides are now rust colored, rather than the usual green, as a result of the devastation. Many factors are thought to be causing the problem, some natural, some perhaps not — warming yearly temperatures are just one of the culprits. There is certainly cause for concern as the trees disappear, but there are also those who believe that this may be a good thing, clearing the forest of old, weak trees while making way for more diversity and growth in the future. A parallel has been made with the fires that swept through Yellowstone 20 years ago. At first thought of as a disaster, we now see that it spurred a rich diversity of new habitat and species.
Getting the camera on the ground, or in this case on the ice, always provides a nice perspective, especially for smaller animals. But with these river otters, I was also getting as low as possible in order to get their inevitable shake of the head (and subsequent water spray) against that nice dark background.
If you’ve been checking out my posts for a while, you know that the black-crested macaques are one of my favorite subjects. They are listed as critically endangered, having lost 80% of their population in the last 40 years. This one seems to be contemplating that fact. The reason for the population decline is mainly due to habitat loss. They live only in Tangkoko National Park on the northern tip of the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.
We use cookies to enhance your experience while using our website. If you are using our Services via a browser you can restrict, block or remove cookies through your web browser settings. We also use content and scripts from third parties that may use tracking technologies. You can selectively provide your consent below to allow such third party embeds. For complete information about the cookies we use, data we collect and how we process them, please check our Privacy Policy