Here’s one from the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. Pretty cool to see a 300 plus pound animal scale 50 feet of a tree in seconds. Her cubs were already high in the tree and stayed there for a while. She went up and down a few times, trying to stay away from a large male bear that was foraging at the bottom (and didn’t seem too interested in her or the cubs… or me, thankfully).
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.
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.
This Atlantic puffin was photographed on Machias Seal Island, just off the northern coast of Maine. The island remains a disputed territory between the U.S. and Canada, although there is a continuously occupied lighthouse on the island, run by the Canadians. They consider the island part of New Brunswick. There are two towns in Maine that offer trips to the island to photograph the birds, Jonesport and Cutler. No Canadian companies offer trips. Other than the lighthouse, there are 8 or so blinds on the island from which to photograph the puffins and other birds. Apparently there has been some concern from the Canadian side that tourists landing on the island might not be good for the birds but there has been no effort so far to outlaw the practice. www.seancrane.com
May is horseshoe crab mating season and the greatest congregation of them in the world is in the Delaware Bay. Each high tide brings the crabs to shore where they lay their eggs. They peak during full moons but are also active during a new moon (which was the case when I took this photo). It also helped that dead high tide was just after sunset making it the perfect time to get slow exposure photos. They are actually not even crabs but more closely related to spiders and scorpions and are one of the oldest living creatures on earth, predating both dinosaurs and birds by about 150 million years.
I came across this red fox mother and pup early one morning while driving through Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware. There was another pup too, and they were very habituated to humans, allowing me to photograph from fairly close range. It was one of those moments when everything came together nicely — the sun was in the right place, the background was nice and the animals interacted as if I wasn’t there. This shot was featured on National Geographic’s website as their photo of the day on Feb. 14th.