A couple of shots I took of myself this past weekend in the slot canyons of Page, Arizona. I placed myself in the photos so you can get a sense of scale. There are two slot canyons near Page, Upper and Lower Antelope Canyon. This is the less visited, Lower Canyon. And I use the term less visited loosely because this is a very popular destination. I was able to enter with a photographer’s pass and thus, avoid the requirement of being with a tour group. The lower canyon is more challenging than the upper because it is smaller and deeper, necessitating a steeper decent on ladders. You used to have to enter using ropes to get to the canyon floor, but a flash flood in 1997 killed 11 hikers and since then they’ve made it easier to get in to and out of. Both canyons are located on Navaho Nation land and are administered by the Navajo as National Tribal Parks.
I’m off for a few days for the 4th, so this will be the last post until later next week. What  you see here is prickly pear cactus and some desert indian paintbrush. What you don’t see is the snake that came slithering out of those rocks after I almost stepped on it.
This little guy was defending his slushy turf and doing a pretty good job of it. We were in Japan in late March and things were definitely starting to melt up at Jigokudani Hotsprings near Nagano. Other than humans, Japanese macaques are the most northerly living primates (but I think I already mentioned that in a previous post.)
First of all, sorry about the flurry of broken link posts that were sent out yesterday at about 6PM. I was updating my site and messing with a few things and, well, you saw what happened. From now on, I’m going to deactivate my subscribers list when I’m doing maintenance. Please don’t unsubscribe. I promise, it won’t happen again… I think.
As for the post — just a few kids playing down by the river with an elephant. Apparently, that’s okay in Sumatra. Actually, the kids are children of the elephant handlers and to them, the elephants are pets that they grow up with.
When the sun is low in the sky and there’s plenty of forest reflecting off the surface of the water, you can really get some interesting colors. This spectacled caiman was photographed late in the day on Lake Chalalan in Madidi National Park in Bolivia. Spectacled caiman can live in either salt or fresh water and because of their adaptability, are the most common of all the crocodilian species.
Another photo of the wild burros that I stumbled across in Moreno Valley, California. These two kept chasing each other back and forth, enabling me to get some nice slow shutter speed, motion blurred shots.
This night monkey seems to be enjoying his mango. Night monkeys are the only truly nocturnal monkey. I photographed this one in the Pampas region of Bolivia one night after dinner. The interesting thing about these guys is that they are susceptible to the same strain of malaria that humans are and are therefore used in medical research.
This used to be called a rufous-sided towhee, although the powers that be have decided that the western and eastern variants in the US are separate species. So to be hip, we’ll call it its new name, the spotted towhee (the eastern guys are appropriately called eastern towhees). Regardless of the name, both suffer from the cruel injustice of the female cowbird. Seems the cowbird sneaks into the towhee’s nest when an expectant mother isn’t there, removes the towhee eggs and then deposits a few of her own. The cowbird splits the scene before the towhee knows what’s going on. Unable to distinguish that a switch has occurred, the towhee will incubate the eggs as if her own.
We stumbled upon this landscape while driving from Montalcino to Montepulciano in southern Tuscany. In several of the Tuscan hill towns, we had seen postcards depicting this exact view. I would have liked to have photographed it either earlier or later in the day when the light was more dramatic, but those low clouds provided an interesting sky and just enough cover to diffuse the sun a bit.
Before I get to this good looking red frog, you might have noticed that the blog looks different today. I’ve been trying all sorts of things over the weekend to integrate it into a regular website. Everything is still in the works and unfortunately, in the process, I lost my subscribers list. I added back all those that I was able to save but if you didn’t get an email, please re-subscribe at the bottom of the page.
As for the frog, I posted a similar shot a couple of years ago. This is a tomato frog from Madagascar. This one is the female. She is much larger and more colorful than the brownish male.
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