There are fifteen different species of marmot in the world. This one is a hoary marmot and it is native to the Pacific northwest. I was hiking in Rainier National Park in Washington when I came across a bunch of these guys scattered throughout the alpine wildflowers. Enjoy the long weekend. I’m off to Colorado and will be back on Tuesday — hopefully with some new creatures to share.

I was up in Bronxville, New York this past weekend at a house party and saw a few black squirrels running around in the back yard. It reminded me of the ones that I used to get at my house in Michigan, including this guy here peeking out of a hole in a tree. Black squirrels are actually a melanistic subgroup of the eastern grey squirrel that carry a mutant black pigment gene. They are common in the Midwestern United States, Ontario, Quebec and parts of the Northeastern United States and Britain.  One theory suggests that they have thrived in these colder areas because their dark fur gives them the advantage of heat retention over grey colored squirrels.

I spent quite a bit of time habituating this nine-banded armadillo on Merritt Island in Florida. Eventually it became comfortable enough with my presence to go about its business of digging frantically for grubs, termites, ants and other insects. Armadillos have very poor eyesight, but a great sense of smell and can detect prey through 8 inches of soil. If you look close, you can see the rotted bits of wood that the armadillo is tossing aside as it digs.

I captured this shot early one morning in Badlands National Park in South Dakota. The pronghorn was standing so still that I was able to take several exposures and then blend them together to hold all the detail in the sky while still exposing for the foreground.

This one is from a trip to Maine a few years back. I was at Baxter State Park when I saw this moose cow in the middle of Sandy Stream Pond. Moose like the nutrient rich vegetation that sits on the bottom of the pond. She was out there for what seemed like an hour, grazing under water and allowing me to get many shots.

A little more than a year ago, I posted a very similar shot of the Joshua Tree landscape and the desert in bloom. This photo, however, shows more of that hairy prickly pear cactus in the foreground that kind of looks like an old man’s beard. The desert blooms very quickly and unpredictably. I was lucky on this trip to catch it in all its glory.

I’ve been thinking about Badlands National Park lately and wanting to get back out there sometime soon. This photo was taken one stormy afternoon back in 2008. Beyond the spectacular landscapes, the park is full of easily seen wildlife, including bison, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, coyote, prairie dogs and the rare and endangered black footed ferret (which I’ve yet to see).

Okay, I know I’ve posted quite a few harbor seals lately, but I really can’t get enough of these guys. This one looked like he had quite the headache. As with the other two harbor seal posts lately, this was taken at Children’s Pool Beach in La Jolla, California.

Here’s another species of cactus, this time in Anza-Borrego State Park in southern California. It was getting dark when I took this shot and I ended it up with quite a few pieces of the prickly stuff stuck to my legs by the time I made it back to the car.

This is an old one that I took back in 2002 when I was living in my car and still shooting slides. I was doing a lot of experimenting with shooting the moon as a double exposure. The rule of thumb was to shoot the moon at the shutter speed of your film (so 125th of second for 100 speed film) and f/16. That way you just record the moon and nothing else on the slide is exposed. You have to remember where the moon is on the slide, then reposition for the landscape. In this case I used a telephoto lens to get the moon and a wide angle for the landscape. Of course, now all you do is combine two different shots in Photoshop, but it was fun to get it in one take. This was at Saguaro National Park just outside of downtown Tucson.