This one is from Mount Evans in Colorado, a quick drive from Denver. A herd of mountain goats were below the lip of the ridge and I would have driven right past without noticing if I hadn’t seen this guy poking his head above the rocks.
This is a black skimmer that I photographed on Merritt Island in Florida. When feeding, they fly just above the water, using their lower beak to skim the surface for food.
I’ve watched great blue herons nesting before in Venice, Florida, but never saw them grabbing branches as big as the ones they were on this particular day.
Black oystercatchers are a large shorebird and one of my favorites in North American. Not really sure why, but I really like their entirely black feathers, orangish-red beaks, yellow, orange-ringed eyes, and pinkish legs. Nothing flashy, just a good solid, unpretentious bird. I was on a cliff, looking down on this one near San Simeon, California. They nest just above the high tide line of rocky shorelines and prey upon many small invertebrates including mussels, crabs and barnacles. Oddly enough, however, they don’t eat oysters.
I photographed this osprey last month at one of the country’s top birding spots — Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island in Florida. Osprey’s are somewhat unique, being a single species that occurs worldwide (except in Antarctica). They are fish eating raptors, sometimes called sea hawks, and you can see the tail of a fish in this one’s talons.
This here is a California newt, also known as an orange bellied newt. These guys are pretty big for newts, growing to 8 inches in length. It was somewhat rare to come across one on land because it’s breeding season and although they are land dwelling for most of the year, they stay in the water from December to early May when they are taking care of business. They also happen to be highly toxic and if ingested can kill you. I made sure not to eat him.
No animals in this one, just a simple country road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. This was early in the morning in a part of the park called Cade’s Cove, an area of open fields that provide one of the best places in the country to view black bears in the wild.
Badlands National Park in South Dakota is one of my favorite places in the US. There’s plenty of wildlife, and also great landscape opportunities pretty much everywhere in the park. This photo was taken late one afternoon just before a rainstorm. The desert sunflowers were in bloom and everywhere along the roadside.
As anyone who has been to Bosque Del Apache in New Mexico knows, getting shots of sandhill cranes isn’t difficult. With so many cranes, it’s easy to experiment with different exposures/shutter speeds, angles, etc. What I was trying to do with this particular photo was to use a slower shutter speed to capture the blurred movement of the bird in flight.