Here’s another look at the sun rising behind Monument Valley in Utah.

A quick break from Brazil for a shot I took yesterday in Baxter State Park in Maine. I flew up on Saturday morning hoping to catch bull moose in the fall rut. Of course, what I didn’t know is that Saturday also happened to be the first day of moose hunting season and as any self-respecting bull moose knows, this is no time to be showing one’s face around town. Instead, I had to settle for landscape photos of mooseless — but nonetheless spectacular — fall color. That’s Mount Katahdin in the background, the northern end of the Appalachian Trail and Maine’s highest peak.

This little bird is called a black phoebe. I spotted it while walking through the dunes on Pismo Beach in California early one morning last winter.  Just as I got down on the ground to get a few eye level shots, it flew away.

This guy’s clear objective was to hang out in a field all day waiting for passers by so that he might impress them with his superb goatee. He is, of course, an American bison and he was grazing in a nice grassy patch of Badlands National Park in South Dakota.

When it comes to birds, most people couldn’t tell you the difference between an egret and a heron, let alone a warbler and a wren. My friend Sabrina isn’t like most people. She knows all about birds. She also happens to be eight years old. Her favorite bird is the northern mockingbird. I didn’t even know that I had taken photos of a northern mockingbird until I saw Sabrina’s hand made field guide of the species the other day. I had simply filed my photos under “Unidentified Birds/Cape May/New Jersey.” Sabrina acknowledges that it’s not the most colorful bird in the world, but she doesn’t care, it has personality.

Reddish egrets are one of the more amusing birds to watch while they are feeding. They run back and forth in the water, zig zagging left and right as if drunk, before making a catch. They do this to confuse the fish, also using the shadows cast by their wings. They are less common than other egrets and most have this red and grey coloration, however, there is also a white morph of the species. This one was photographed at Fort Desoto Beach in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

Black-tailed deer are fairly common near the Paradise Visitor’s Center in Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state. This one walked right past me while I was photographing the wildflowers.

I had a request for river otters so here’s an old one from Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge in Indiana. The otter population in Indiana had been wiped out due to over trapping and loss of habitat, but in 1995 they were reintroduced to Muscatatuck and have since thrived at this location.

A couple of minutes earlier I couldn’t see a thing, but as the mist started to clear a lineup of roseate spoonbills appeared feeding on the sandbar. This was at Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island on the Gulf Coast of Florida.