As soon as I got down on the ground, this bobcat became very comfortable with my presence. In fact, it started walking toward me, keeping a watchful eye, but not too concerned. In this photo, it was about 10 to 15 feet away as it slowly walked right on by, on its way to find some breakfast.

I’m out in LA and then Orlando, Dallas and Atlanta for a couple of weeks for work but I wanted to keep the photo of the day blog going so I loaded up two weeks of photos before I left for the airport. That being said, there are a bunch of repeat species. Not repeat photos, but animals that I may have sent before. Like this white squirrel here only in this shot he/she has a nut in his/her mouth which I kind of liked, and it makes the photo different enough from the last time I sent one of these semi albino grey squirrels from Olney, Illinois.

Here’s another from my day at the elephant seal nursery. It seemed as if every adult female was alongside a newborn pup.

Toads may fall short in the glamour department, but they make up for it in personality. This handsome little specimen was rustling around in the leaf litter along the side of a trail in Baxter State Park in Maine.

Here’s another of the pine martens that I photographed over the Christmas break in Silver Gate, Montana, just outside of Yellowstone. There were two scurrying around and they were pretty quick, so difficult to photograph. Every now and again, I’d see a head pop up somewhere and then dart away as soon as I put the camera to my eye. In this instance, I was able to get the shot before the pine marten disappeared again.

I know I’ve been posting a lot of river otters lately, but I keep finding new ones that I like. The otters work hard at keeping a few holes in the ice open throughout the cold winter. The holes also make it an easy time of year to photograph them because (with only three or four holes in a given lake) you always know where they are going to surface.

Been a while since I posted something from the Pacific northwest, so here’s another look at the ochre sea stars that can be found up and down the coast of Olympic National Park in Washington. These sea stars are predatory, preferring to eat mussels, and they are actually quite important to the healthy diversity of their habitat. In their absence, mussels take over almost completely, crowding out other species. This photo was taken well after the sun had gone down and I needed a 25 second exposure in order to have enough light.

Continuing on last week’s theme of depressing stories from the field, I figured why not one more, this time featuring an elk and pine beetles. Pine beetles are killing trees in Rocky Mountain National Park at an alarming rate. Entire mountainsides are now rust colored, rather than the usual green, as a result of the devastation. Many factors are thought to be causing the problem, some natural, some perhaps not — warming yearly temperatures are just one of the culprits. There is certainly cause for concern as the trees disappear, but there are also those who believe that this may be a good thing, clearing the forest of old, weak trees while making way for more diversity and growth in the  future. A parallel has been made with the fires that swept through Yellowstone 20 years ago. At first thought of as a disaster, we now see that it spurred a rich diversity of new habitat and species.

That’s an osprey. That’s a fish. And that’s about all there is to say about this one. Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in Texas.

Getting the camera on the ground, or in this case on the ice, always provides a nice perspective, especially for smaller animals. But with these river otters, I was also getting as low as possible in order to get their inevitable shake of the head (and subsequent water spray) against that nice dark background.