As promised, here’s another armadillo from out on Merritt Island in Florida. As I mentioned in the last post, armadillos are practically blind but they have a very good sense of smell. As soon the wind blew in its direction, the armadillo would sniff the air for a second or two, know that I was there, and then scurry into the woods. The tricky part was getting on the ground quick enough to get a shot.
The ringtail lemurs that live in southern Madagascar like to sit in the sand and sunbathe on nice mornings. I caught some good light on this guy when he took a quick look back to see what I was doing. One of the things that I really liked about Berenty Private Reserve (where this photo was taken) is that it’s one of the few places in Madagascar where you can hike through the forest without having to be accompanied by a guide. This is because it is privately owned. At all the national run parks, it is mandatory that you be with a guide. Ordinarily, I think this is a good thing because the guides can show you things that you would miss on your own, but there’s something nice about being alone in a forest — just you and the animals.
Here’s one that I haven’t yet been able to identify. For any of you entomologists out there, suggestions are certainly welcome. I was hiking in Pavones, Costa Rica, near the Panama border when I came across this little guy crawling up the stalk of a plant.
Not much wildlife to be found in Death Valley National Park in California, but plenty of landscapes. This was my favorite spot to shoot. It’s an ancient dried out lake bed called The Racetrack. It’s known for the mysterious moving rocks that leave trails in the cobbled mud. There are several theories as to how the rocks move, but the one that gets the most agreement is that heavy winds do the moving during the rare times when the lake bed gets wet (which is hardly ever — Death Valley being the driest spot on the continent). Of course, no one has ever witnessed the rocks moving so this is all just a theory. Another interesting thing about this type of dried lake is that it’s the flattest naturally occurring land surface. The Racetrack is in a remote part of this remote national park and very difficult to get to. A high clearance four wheel drive is recommended. I did it in a Ford Focus. And I now owe the rental car company a hubcap.
The female proboscis monkeys don’t have the large potato-like noses of the males, but they’re still a bit odd looking. This one, however, seemed to think she was the shit with her black lipstick and all. She must have been eating some kind of dark fruit just before I took the photo.
Here’s another shot from last spring at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington. I was hiking up in the alpine tundra when I saw this hoary marmot distracted by a passing fly.
Here’s one from the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. Pretty cool to see a 300 plus pound animal scale 50 feet of a tree in seconds. Her cubs were already high in the tree and stayed there for a while. She went up and down a few times, trying to stay away from a large male bear that was foraging at the bottom (and didn’t seem too interested in her or the cubs… or me, thankfully).
At first these bearded piglets ran away from me but then slowly they came out of the forest to investigate, and eventually came so close that I was able to switch to my widest angle lens to get shots of them inches away sniffing the front of the glass. There were eight piglets in all as well as their blind mother who had lost both of her eyes somewhere along the way. An orangutan was in a tree just above them and was playfully swatting at the babies. Apparently, they live in harmony with each other and I had a few other sightings of adult pigs foraging for fruit closely behind the orangutans, picking up their scraps. The adults are truly ugly creatures (in a good way) and get their name from a thick beard around their snout.
These sea stars are called bat stars. They come in all different colors, but mostly orange (I also saw a few purples and yellow ones). This photo was taken at low tide just before the sun went down at a place called Montana De Oro State Park in Los Osos, California.