I guess I should have posted this guy last Sunday. This is a cottontail rabbit, common throughout most of the US. I photographed this one at a place called Bluff Lake near the old Stapleton Airport in Denver. At dawn and dusk cottontails are always out foraging around and I certainly come across a lot of them when I’m driving around the country.
The adolescent orangutans were my favorites because of their curiosity. I was face down on the ground photographing the little bearded pigs when this guy came along. He was swinging on a vine, at first swatting at the pigs. When I got up to take a few photos, he started swinging toward me, getting closer with each swing. All of a sudden he reached out to tap me gently on the head. He did this a few times, and tapped me a few times on the chest too. Then he would sit back in the tree and sniff his finger. He seemed fascinated with my bald, sweaty head.
This is a blue gamma lizard from somewhere in Uganda. Shelley and I were eating lunch at an open air restaurant when we saw this guy creeping up that tree trunk and looking out over the savannah below.
This is a female shining honeycreeper at a place called La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. The male is purplish blue with black wings. A lot of biological research goes on in the rain forest of La Selva and there are always a lot of researchers and college students hiking around the many trails. Fortunately, they also allow tourists to the area (mostly to help fund the research) and it’s one of the best place in Costa Rica for birds.
Here is another shot of a fanaloka, one of the few larger mammals that I saw in Madagascar that wasn’t a lemur. They are nocturnal and very secretive but at Ranomafana National Park in central Madagascar, they come creeping around a picnic area looking for leftover scraps. Fanalokas are the size of a large housecat and they resemble a fox, but they are more closely related to the mongoose.
In honor of finally selling my house in Michigan this past week (been on the market for two years) I figured I’d post one more shot of the squirrel that used to hang out just outside my home office window. On hot summer days, it would emerge from its hole in the tree and just hang there lazily on the branch, as if exhausted.
I had been to the Fort Myers, Florida area several times to photograph birds out on Sanibel Island. Each time, I drove right past the town of Cape Coral not knowing that it was a hotspot for burrowing owls. Last time I was there, I stumbled upon an article on the owls and decided to look around. Every inch of Cape Coral seems to be developed with suburban sprawl. Still, the owls find places to build nests — be it in homeowners yards, or small plots of grass adjacent to strip malls, gas stations and Walmarts. Luckily, the residents seem to take it as a badge of honor if a pair of owls digs out a nest in their yard and they do all they can to protect them from harm. Of course, it also helps that they are federally protected. When I was there it was mostly overcast, but then suddenly a little bit of late day sun poked through and I got this shot.
Black-crested macaques are quite possibly my favorite type of monkey — even though this guy swatted me in the head a split second after I took this photo. They are listed on the IUCN Red List (International Union For Conservation of Nature) as critically endangered, which is the final category before extinction. They live only on the northern tip of the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia and are the reason I set aside a couple of days and made the effort to visit Sulawesi and Tangkoko National Park. The island isn’t visited by very many tourists and those who do go are usually there for the scuba diving. Despite conservation efforts, their numbers have been in steady decline due to hunting for bush meat and habitat destruction. I saw this first hand as we followed a group of the macaques for several hours and ended up in a section of the forest recently burned illegall, by local farmers to clear the way for planting. Much more on these guys to come.
I came across this male red-winged blackbird one morning last summer at the Wellfleet Wildlife Sanctuary in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He must have been protecting a nest that was very close to a little bridge over a pond because when I walked past, he started chirping noisily and even took a few dives toward my head. These birds are fairly common throughout the US and into Central America. I see them a lot when driving around the country. The male has the namesake red wings, whereas the female is a nondescript brown color.