The jaguar may be the animal that everyone hopes to see in the Pantanal, but the jabiru stork is without a doubt the face of Brazil’s great wetland. Highly conspicuous throughout the Pantanal, the jabiru stork is the largest flying bird in the Americas. As you can see, the male and female are very similar in appearance.
A quick break from Brazil to head back to Uganda. This was one of the four babies in the troop of twenty three mountain gorillas we saw in Bwindi National Park.
Burrowing owls can look like little old men while standing guard over their burrows. They are very small, only about 10 inches for a full grown adult. I’ve photographed them before in Florida, California and South Dakota, but this one was in northwestern Brazil.
I know a lot of you have seen these two photos before, but I’m happy to announce that they were both just selected as “Highly Honored” in the Nature’s Best photo competition. This is the show I consider to be the second best behind the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. Each photo will appear in the Fall/Winter 2010 awards annual edition of the magazine, so it should be out soon. In addition, they could end up in the Smithsonian Gallery exhibit (eventually, they’ll choose a selection from the highly honored winners to hang in the museum). The first photo is of a leaf-tailed gecko from Madagascar. It was entered in the “Small Wonders” category. The second is of horseshoe crabs spawning at Cape May, New Jersey and it was entered in the “Oceans” category.
I spent five days on the Cuiabá River and its tributaries searching for jaguars in the Brazilian Pantanal. In that time, I only got lucky on a single morning, but on that morning I saw four different jags within a three hour period. This is the first of the sightings. In the top photo, green ibis are in the foreground as the jaguar emerged from the woods and walked slowly across the beach. She wasn’t there for long, and as my guide tried to maneuver the boat closer, she casually looked up at us before ducking back into the forest.
When you don’t see them in relation to an adult, baby giant river otters look a lot like the regular river otters we get in the United States. They’re similar in size, and haven’t yet developed the characteristic yellow splotches on their chests. The above baby otter was playing with a few of its siblings until the mother came along (below) and ushered them further down the riverbank.
From parakeets to macaws, there are many different shapes, sizes and colors of parrots in Brazil. Here are just three of the many that I saw. The first is a jandaya parakeet, the second a blue fronted parrot and the third a yellow chevroned parakeet. There’s often confusion as to the difference between a parrot and a parakeet when, in fact, parakeets are simply a large group of different parrots that are small in size and have long tails. A parrot, by definition, is any bird with a hooked bill and on each foot two toes facing forward and two back. Glad we cleared this up.
Here’s another look at the Brazilian maned wolf, this time with a wider angle lens and dual flash set up. I also used a graduated neutral density filter to bring out the last remaining color in the clouds before it got dark. For most of the photos I took of the wolf, I was laying on the ground to get the low angle perspective.
Green iguanas can grow to be six and a half feet in length and weigh more than 20 pounds. This one, photographed in northern Brazil, seemed to be about that size.
A couple weeks ago I posted a tufted eared marmoset. This one is called a black tailed marmoset. Not the most attractive animal in the world, but it does have its charms.