It’s amazing how different the faces of each orangutan I met in Borneo were. And the hairstyles. This young lady almost looked like she was wearing a wig. Photographed in Tanjung Puting National Park in Indonesian Borneo. Nikon D300 with Nikkor 200-400mm lens (at 200mm) ISO 800, f/4 at 1/200th of a second.
Here’s another one from the backyard, albeit captured the old fashioned way. I used to see lots of these birds at our previous house in New York and ended up taking them for granted. I don’t see near as many at our place in Connecticut, but lately they’ve been more active. I always thought they were sweet little birds with their soft gray and yellowish coloring and that stylish head tuft. The light in the woods was fading fast so I was testing out the vibration reduction of the new 500mm PF lens. Pretty good at 1/25th of a second handheld. Nikon D500 with Nikkor 500mm PF lens, ISO 800, f/5.6 at 1/25th of a second.
I had another visitor to my camera trap this weekend. An eastern coyote. We often hear coyotes howling at night and I suspect I’ve seen their eyeshine staring back at me from the woods when I have my headlamp on, but I’ve yet to have a verified sighting in the yard. The eastern version of the coyote is supposedly larger than the western variety due to interbreeding with Canadian gray wolves. They call the combo a coywolf and I know there have been efforts to classify it as a separate species altogether. This guy, however, seems quite a bit scrawnier than those I’ve seen and photographed out west. Of course, could be the lack of a thick coat. Nikon D810 with Nikkor 17-35mm lens (at 17mm) ISO 500, f/11 at 1/125th of a second, Cognisys camera box, trail monitor and flashes.
Penguins, of course, can’t fly, but this gentoo was doing his/her best to make it happen. It was fun to watch them as they shot from beneath the surface of the water into the air and then back down again. But it was a challenge — in a whack a mole kind of way — to predict where the next one might pop up for a picture. Photographed on Sea lion Island in the Falkland Islands. Nikon D800 with Nikkor 200-400mm lens (at 250mm) ISO 800, f/6.3 at 1/2000th of a second.
This black-backed jackal allowed me a pretty close approach, and seemed more curious than anything else when I crouched down in the dry grass to get a lower level perspective. The light would get really soft at the end of the day in the Kalahari desert of Botswana — basically due to the sun getting very low (and huge) on the horizon because it was so flat and there were no hills or trees to obstruct its descent. Nikon D300 with Nikkor 200-400mm lens (at 210mm) ISO 800, f/4 at 1/400th of a second.
Felt like a good night for a dove. In this case a Galápagos dove. Photographed on Genovesa Island. This species is found only in the Galápagos archipelago, but is fairly common in its limited range. Nikon D700 with Nikkor 200-400mm lens (at 330mm) ISO 400, f/5 at 1/640th of a second.
Only about 4,500 Baird’s tapirs remain in the wild, a thousand of them in Costa Rica where I took this photo. It is the largest mammal in Central America and the threat to its survival is twofold — both habit loss and poaching. I was able to get some pretty good looks at this rather large, but difficult to see animal. By sitting still for hours I got very close and most of my shots were with my wide angle lens, but for this exposure, I put on my longer lens for a ground-level portrait. There wasn’t a lot of light in the deep forest so I had to jack up the ISO for a useable shutter speed. Nikon D700 with Nikkor 70-200mm lens (at 98mm) ISO 3200, f/2.8 at 1/160th of a second.
After four months of trying, one of the local bears finally cooperated and walked past my camera trap last night — taking a few photos of himself while I was getting ready for bed. I’m pretty sure this is the same adult male that I posted a few weeks ago. He looked much bigger in that photo because it was taken with a 500mm lens as opposed to this shot with a 17mm lens. Perspective from focal length can really change the appearance of the subject. My guess is that he was about two feet from the camera in this image.Nikon D810 with Nikkor 17-35mm lens (at 17mm) ISO 500, f/8 at 1/125th of a second, Cognisys camera box, trail monitor and flash units.
The granular poison frog is also known as the green jeans frog (for fairly obvious reasons). It’s found only in Costa Rica and Panama in a relatively small range. Habitat loss in that range has landed the frog on the vulnerable to extinction list. I found this one near a waterfall in Pavones, Costa Rica. Nikon D200 with Nikkor 70-200mm lens (with Nikon 1.7x teleconverter attached for 340mm) ISO 100, f/8 at 6 seconds.
It’s called a wolf. Its nickname is fox-on-stilts. But it’s neither a wolf nor a fox. It’s the only species in the genus Chrysocyon, meaning golden dog. I only saw two of them while in Brazil — this being the one of the two that allowed me photo opps. Nikon D700 with Nikkor 70-200mm lens (at 95mm) ISO 800, f/4 at 1/400th of a second.