When it comes to birds, most people couldn’t tell you the difference between an egret and a heron, let alone a warbler and a wren. My friend Sabrina isn’t like most people. She knows all about birds. She also happens to be eight years old. Her favorite bird is the northern mockingbird. I didn’t even know that I had taken photos of a northern mockingbird until I saw Sabrina’s hand made field guide of the species the other day. I had simply filed my photos under “Unidentified Birds/Cape May/New Jersey.” Sabrina acknowledges that it’s not the most colorful bird in the world, but she doesn’t care, it has personality.
One of the reasons Madagascar is my favorite place on earth is that everything is different. Not just all the endemic animals that are found nowhere else on the planet, but all the plants, the flowers, the trees, the rock formations, the landscape in general that looks and feels like nowhere else. I’ve been so many places now that I can be on safari in eastern Africa and suddenly feel like I’m in southern Australia, or even driving down a stretch of road in Nebraska (until, of course, an elephant walks across the road). It would be impossible for me to convey that sense of otherworldliness in a photo, but I can at least attempt a few small glimpses. These are verreaux’s sifaka lemurs in Madagascar’s southern spiny forest. There’s nothing quite like hiking through the woods surrounded by these exotic animals and the tall, thorny trees that are everywhere with their pipe cleaner like branches that extend randomly in every direction.
It’s been a while since I posted a gorilla so here’s another one from Bwindi National Park in Uganda. This baby was crawling all over its mother’s back, swinging from vines and playing with one of the other two babies in the troop.
Reddish egrets are one of the more amusing birds to watch while they are feeding. They run back and forth in the water, zig zagging left and right as if drunk, before making a catch. They do this to confuse the fish, also using the shadows cast by their wings. They are less common than other egrets and most have this red and grey coloration, however, there is also a white morph of the species. This one was photographed at Fort Desoto Beach in Saint Petersburg, Florida.
Black-tailed deer are fairly common near the Paradise Visitor’s Center in Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state. This one walked right past me while I was photographing the wildflowers.
I had a request for river otters so here’s an old one from Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge in Indiana. The otter population in Indiana had been wiped out due to over trapping and loss of habitat, but in 1995 they were reintroduced to Muscatatuck and have since thrived at this location.
A couple of minutes earlier I couldn’t see a thing, but as the mist started to clear a lineup of roseate spoonbills appeared feeding on the sandbar. This was at Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
In Entebbe, Uganda, vervet monkeys are so common, they’re kind of like squirrels are here. We were in a city park when we came across a troop of them playing and eating in a stand of bamboo. You might recall an earlier shot of a vervet that I sent a while back featuring the spectacular blue of the adult males.
Wild mustangs still roam free in many areas out west (and east for that matter), including Monument Valley, Utah. This is Navajo country and this particular photo was taken near the entrance to the Monument Valley National Tribal Park administered by Navajo Nation.
This is an old one that I took back in 2002 when I was living in my car and drove to Alaska. The place is Katmai National Park, where in mid July the salmon run is in full swing and large numbers of brown bears gather to fatten up before the fall hibernation. This guy kept poking his head under water, hoping for an easy catch.
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