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.
I stayed at Seal River Lodge in northern Manitoba, Canada for four nights last week in the hopes of bringing back some nice photographs of polar bears. The lodge sits in the middle of the sub-Arctic tundra, miles from any other habitation and is prime polar bear territory from mid October to mid November — just before the Hudson Bay freezes and the bears move out onto the ice to hunt for seals. The only access to the lodge is via an eight passenger plane from the small town of Churchill, a half an hour south. It was the final morning of my trip and I had already gotten plenty of photos of the bears in all sorts of settings and in all sorts of lighting conditions. Satisfied with the four days of shooting, the group I was with wasn’t even certain if we would venture out on the final morning because we were due to catch the flight back to Churchill shortly after breakfast — and also because the temperature had dipped to minus – 27º Fahrenheit with the wind chill factor. But then everything came together perfectly and we all forgot about the wind and the cold and the fact that we had to catch a flight. First thing was the mist that was rising off the water of the bay for the first time all week. Then there was the low tide, exposing giant boulders of ice scattered across the shoreline. The sky was looking good with nice low clouds and a rising sun. Everything was perfect, except there were no bears. And then, on cue, three showed up and cooperatively walked right out into the middle of it all. The first photo was taken vertically because my lens was too long and I couldn’t get the sun in otherwise. The second was a few minutes later after I changed to a shorter lens.
These giant river otters look like they’re up to something a bit scandalous. I liked the way you can see the enormous size of the webbed hand on the one on the right. They were actually just grooming each other after a meal.
PS: This will be last post for a week as I head to extreme northern Manitoba Canada in search of polar bears. See you when I get back.
Red-capped cardinals were fairly common in the Pantanal. I got a lot of good close ups of them hanging around the lodge, but these two were photographed while deep up river late one afternoon on one of our jaguar searching missions.
Those are giant green sea anemones mixed in among all the barnacles, mussels and other tidepool life. This was taken one cloudy morning along the Washington coast in Olympic National Park.
Just a zebra minding its business. There are three different kinds of zebra in Africa, the mountain zebra, Grevy’s zebra and plains zebra. This guy is a Burchell’s zebra which is a subspecies of the plains zebra. You never know when you might need this valuable information. This photo was taken in Mburro National Park in Uganda.
Rufescent tiger herons were just one of the bird species that I photographed with their heads peaking out of the water hyacinth. These floating plants are a common site along river banks throughout the Pantanal in Brazil.
Here’s another look at the sun rising behind Monument Valley in Utah.
The light definitely didn’t cooperate with me the day I visited the famous “Einstein” monkeys in northeastern Brazil making shooting conditions difficult (although I do like the final shot because I had time to get into a better position vis a vis the light). None the less, this is a sequence showing the unique behavior that has earned these monkeys the distinction of the most intelligent in the New World. “Einstein” is just a nickname, of course, and they are actually called tufted capuchin monkeys. They range throughout a large portion of northern and central South America, but only those in this remote area of Brazil display this particular behavior. Their favorite food is the palm nut and they harvest only the ripest nuts. They then tear the outer husk off the nuts and leave them in the sun to dry for about a week. When they return to the dried nuts, they place them on a large flat rock surface, which acts as an anvil. They then use much harder igneous rock boulders as their tool to smash open the nuts. It’s really pretty cool to see these wiry monkeys lifting large boulders over their heads and then smashing them down. Only chimpanzees are known to make more intelligent use of tools.
This crested caracara was trying to enjoy his catfish lunch in peace, but the black vultures kept trying to sneak in and steal a bite. Every so often the caracara would attack the vultures to get them to back off. With my long lens mounted to the camera, I wasn’t able to capture both birds, but as you can see, I did catch just a piece of the vulture’s foot. The location was the Pantanal in Brazil.