Indonesia is famous for its hornbills but halfway through my trip I still hadn’t seen any. This was one of the first I was able to capture, silhouetted against the rising sun in Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantam, Borneo..
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.
This chamois, high in the Italain Alps, was giving me his best Zoolander look. The name chamois obviously raises a few questions, so a bit of history is in order. The words shammy and chamois were commonly used in the south of France in the late 1600’s to describe a soft leather specially prepared from any goat-like creature, and in particular the European antelope. The leather was of premium quality and used primarily in the making of gloves. In a nearby town, the leather was tanned in cod oil, which is when it was discovered to have incredible absorbency qualities. This was perfect for the soft white gloves worn by carriage footmen, who were responsible for the care and polishing of carriages. Later on, chauffeurs in the early 1900s used chamois gloves to dry windshields for better visibility. Today, of course, the common chamois is not leather at all, but a synthetic material with a high absorbency rating. As always, I aim to educate.
Here’s another from my day at the elephant seal nursery. It seemed as if every adult female was alongside a newborn pup.
White necked herons are a fairly common sight along the rivers of Brazil’s Pantanal region. I was in a small boat, floating quietly past while this one was searching for fish.
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.
In all my travels, Tiskita Lodge in Pavones, Costa Rica was one of my favorite places to stay. Down near the Panama border, it’s not easy to get to, but well worth the effort once you do. I probably saw a greater variety of wildlife just walking around the grounds of the lodge than I’ve seen anywhere else. I was there for four days, and each afternoon a small troop of squirrel monkeys would make an appearance just outside my room to feed on the various fruiting trees. They were just one of the many species that I could literally photograph from the hammock on my front porch.
With all the devastation we’ve been seeing and reading about in Japan, I had been wondering about the snow monkeys that I visited two springs ago up near Nagano. Being well away from the coast and up in the mountains, I figured the tsunami wouldn’t have been a factor, but the earthquake did hit the Nagano area, and regions of high thermal activity are always a concern. Thankfully, the live cam that sits above the Jigokudani hot spring (plus a quick google search) indicates that life is going on as usual for the monkeys.
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.