Here’s another of the rams I saw last weekend in Colorado. This guy had a particularly nice set of horns.

It was the end of the day when we spotted this polar bear taking a nap. He seemed quite content to be lying there on his back on a bed of snow.

On Friday I went to the eastern entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and was surprised to see that there wasn’t any snow on the ground. The next day I tried the western entrance and was greeted by a completely different story. Everything was covered in white, including these two little islands of pine in the middle of a cloud of mist on Lake Granby.

When I have the chance and the time, I like to experiment with these kind of slow shutter speed, motion blurred effects. I recorded this one last Saturday afternoon up in Georgetown, Colorado. The bighorn rut was in full swing, which is the best time of year to see the male rams. The rest of the year they remain in bachelor herds high on the mountain, while the ewes and babies graze at lower elevations.  It also helps that during the rut the males are so focused on the business at hand — mating, or in most cases, trying to mate — that they’re much more tolerant of a close approach. I had already gotten plenty of action freezing shots of the mating ritual that morning (usually a male chasing a female around in circles until she finally tires and succumbs, or until he finally tires and moves on to the next possible taker — but more on that in a future post). The point is, I was satisfied with what I had, so I decided to try and blur a few by slowing the shutter speed to a 1/15th of a second, placing the active focus sensor on the ram’s eye, and then steadily panning the camera with the action while releasing the shutter.

On the ice, in the willows, and along the shoreline, these two bears were constantly play fighting as they passed the time waiting for the bay to freeze. They may not have eaten anything substantial in months, and once frozen, the bears can finally move out onto the ice to hunt for their favorite food source, ringed seals.

The one disappointment of my recent trip was that I didn’t see many other species other than polar bears. I did, however, see this guy — a short-tailed weasel. And I guess you can count this as two species because of the lemming in its mouth. I was fortunate to get the shot, as it was only there for a second before scampering off. I’ll be flying to Colorado tonight for Thanksgiving and hopefully some bighorn rams. Have a good holiday and see you all on Monday with some more polar bears.

This guy was either licking his paw or trying to catch some of those snowflakes. As you can see, the tongue is dark in color. Most polar bears have an even darker, almost black tongue — the same color as the skin under all that white fur.

I stayed at Seal River Lodge in northern Manitoba, Canada for four nights last week in the hopes of bringing back some nice photographs of polar bears.  The lodge sits in the middle of the sub-Arctic tundra, miles from any other habitation and is prime polar bear territory from mid October to mid November — just before the Hudson Bay freezes and the bears move out onto the ice to hunt for seals. The only access to the lodge is via an eight passenger plane from the small town of Churchill, a half an hour south. It was the final morning of my trip and I had already gotten plenty of photos of the bears in all sorts of settings and in all sorts of lighting conditions. Satisfied with the four days of shooting, the group I was with wasn’t even certain if we would venture out on the final morning because we were due to catch the flight back to Churchill shortly after breakfast — and also because the temperature had dipped to minus – 27º Fahrenheit with the wind chill factor. But then everything came together perfectly and we all forgot about the wind and the cold and the fact that we had to catch a flight. First thing was the mist that was rising off the water of the bay for the first time all week. Then there was the low tide, exposing giant boulders of ice scattered across the shoreline. The sky was looking good with nice low clouds and a rising sun. Everything was perfect, except there were no bears. And then, on cue, three showed up and cooperatively walked right out into the middle of it all. The first photo was taken vertically because my lens was too long and I couldn’t get the sun in otherwise. The second was a few minutes later after I changed to a shorter lens.