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.
That’s an osprey. That’s a fish. And that’s about all there is to say about this one. Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in Texas.
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.
And therein lies the beauty of the capybara — while some dismiss it as a gigantic rat, others can appreciate its refined social etiquette. This one here proving the point by covering it’s mouth before sneezing. For those who weren’t paying attention the last time I posted a capybara, they are the world’s largest rodent, living throughout much of South America. This one was photographed in the Pantanal of Brazil.
This baby spectral tarsier appears to be communicating something to its mother. These tiny primates are listed as vulnerable on the IUCN red list of endangered species, mainly due to a rapid loss of habitat. This was taken in Tangkoko National Park in Sulawesi, Indonesia.
This is an eastern newt, otherwise known as a red spotted newt. When young, like this one, it is a bright orange color and called a red eft. For most of its 12 to 15 year long life, it lives in the water, but when in the red eft stage it exists on land. I found this one last spring in New Jersey on a trail while hiking in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.