It was very, very cold on this particular morning. Very cold. And windy. But as much as we were all doing our best to protect ourselves from the weather, the bears seemed to be enjoying it. Every time the wind whipped up, sending granules of snow flying through the air, this bear just raised his head, stuck his face into the wind and took it all in.

With all due respect to monkeys and other creatures of the world, I’ve been told to keep the polar bears coming, so here’s yet another. Of the three bears that we saw most often, this guy was the odd man out. He was smaller than the other two and they kept chasing him off whenever he got too close. In this photo, he was standing to check on their whereabouts as they were foraging behind some nearby rocks. I also liked that I was able to capture his breath on another very cold day.

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.