After several days of failing to get any decent views of chimpanzees, we finally came across a tree in a clearing by a river that had about 8 of them getting ready for nightfall. This mother and baby were pretty high up in the tree. I used my longest lens and cropped in quite a bit.
A couple of elephant seals attempting to make a couple of more elephant seals. This one was taken on a deserted stretch of beach near San Simeon, California.
I photographed this northern flicker at Sylvan Lake State Park in Colorado. It’s the only woodpecker that commonly feeds on the ground. It also has the odd distinction of having over 100 common names, including yellowhammer, clape, gaffer woodpecker, harry-wicket, heigh-ho, wake-up, walk-up, wick-up, yarrup, and gawker bird. Most of the names are attempts at imitating its calls.
The bighorn sheep I saw up at Mount Evans in Colorado over the 4th of July weekend were looking a bit on the haggard side. Well, maybe more than a bit. As you can see, this ewe that I photographed along the side of the road wasn’t exactly sporting a camera ready fur coat. But then again, the patchy look kind of adds character.
Here’s another request, this time from my young friend David Koffler. In the spring, female snapping turtles will travel on land for great distances to find suitable sandy soil to lay their eggs. I came across this one as she crossed a freshly sprouting field of crops near Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware.
I had a request for another spectral tarsier, so here it is. It was actually quite dark when I took this one (tarsiers are nocturnal), but I used a tripod and a long exposure to take advantage of what little light there was (mostly from the full moon). Like the black-crested macaque from yesterday, these guys live in Tangkoko National Park in Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Not much to say here, just a simple portrait of a rather suave looking black-crested macaque.
This is a white-handed gibbon in Bukit Lawang National Park, Sumatra, Indonesia. These lesser apes were easily among the most difficult to photograph primates that I’ve ever come across. For several days I had unsuccessfully been trying to get a shot. I’d see the gibbon for a second and then it would be gone (or it would be too far away, or hiding behind foliage, etc). They were very wary of humans and usually fled before I even knew they were there. It became a bit of an obsession to get a shot and eventually I was rewarded this one quick look — not perfect, but in focus and in decent light. Gibbons are extremely agile in the trees with their long arms and after one click of the shutter this one disappeared.
Flinders Ranges National Park in South Australia is where the mountains meet the Outback.Very rugged territory, and full of kangaroos. We saw lots of both red and western grey kangaroos, plus lots of emus mixed in. This red kangaroo was racing to get somewhere just before the sun dipped below the horizon.
This guy was probably my favorite orangutan at Tanjung Puting National Park in Borneo. His name was Percy and he always seemed to be nearby, hanging in a tree or laying on the grass and making faces (very human-like faces).