At first these bearded piglets ran away from me but then slowly they came out of the forest to investigate, and eventually came so close that I was able to switch to my widest angle lens to get shots of them inches away sniffing the front of the glass. There were eight piglets in all as well as their blind mother who had lost both of her eyes somewhere along the way. An orangutan was in a tree just above them and was playfully swatting at the babies. Apparently, they live in harmony with each other and I had a few other sightings of adult pigs foraging for fruit closely behind the orangutans, picking up their scraps. The adults are truly ugly creatures (in a good way) and get their name from a thick beard around their snout.
These sea stars are called bat stars. They come in all different colors, but mostly orange (I also saw a few purples and yellow ones). This photo was taken at low tide just before the sun went down at a place called Montana De Oro State Park in Los Osos, California.
I had seen and photographed black howler monkeys before in Central and South America. This red howler is a sub species found only in the north western Amazon basin. I was in a canoe on Lake Chalalan and the light was fading fast when a troop of red howlers came to an area along the lake to sleep for the night. This guy was the alpha male of the troop and a couple of seconds after this shot was taken he was asleep in the V of the tree.
This one is from Death Valley National Park in California. These are the salt flats of Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level. Repeated freaze-thaw and evaporation cycles gradually push the thin salt crust into these honeycomb shapes.
Here’s another shot from last weekend in Florida at the Venice Rookery. The mother great blue heron is in the process of regurgitating her food to feed to her two young. The two chicks are almost as big as the mother at this point and will leave the nest soon (usually at about 10 weeks old).
This past weekend in Florida I was on a mission to photograph armadillos. Contrary to what a lot of people think, they aren’t just in Texas. Florida is full of them. In fact, their range continues to grow each year because they don’t really have any natural predators and they’ve even been spotted as far north as Indiana. I saw quite a few on Merritt Island, about 45 minutes east of Orlando, but even so, they proved to be one of the hardest animals I’ve ever tried to photograph. The problem is, once you find one, it never seems to lift its head up from the ground and it constantly moves around searching for grubs and other insects like ants. They are virtually blind, but have a great sense of smell, so as soon as one would smell me it would lift its nose into the air for about a second and then scurry off into the bushes. To get decent shots I needed to be face down on the ground, at eye level, at the instant one of them lifted up. I captured a few shots like this with the armadillo on its hind legs with its nose high in the air and I’ll send one of those in a future post. In the meantime, I really liked the shallow depth of field of this one with the blurred foreground and background, and the range of colors.
Kangaroo Island, just south of Adelaide in South Australia, is one of the best spots in the country to view a diverse variety of wildlife — kangaroos, wallabys, seals, sea lions, platypus, penguins, and possums to name a few. It also happens to be one of the best places in Australia for guaranteed koala sightings. This little guy kept venturing from its mother and investigating what I was doing.
This photo was taken near the grounds of a hotel I was staying at in Maroantsetra, Madagascar. Panther chameleons (Furcifer paradalis) can grow to up to 17 inches in length. Their coloring varies depending on which region of Madagascar they live in. The females are primarily orange, although the colors of both sexes changes depending upon many factors.
Milne Edwards’ sportive lemurs live in the dry western forests of Madagascar. This one was photographed in a place called Ankarafantsika National Park. Sportive lemurs are nocturnal, but I got lucky when this guy popped its head out of its night time resting place just as I hiked by.
I’d like to say that I endured great hardship on a trek into the Japanese wilderness to get shots of snow monkeys, but the fact is, Japenese macaques are one of the more easily photographed primates on the planet. At least at Jigokudani Springs near Nagano — an easy two hour journey by bullet train from Tokyo. Every day throughout the year, the monkeys come down from the mountainsides to soak in the springs. Wide angle shots are easy as the monkeys groom, fight, eat and play just a feet away.
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