It’s always hard to show perspective when posting dik dik’s. They’re so small, but without any reference it’s hard to tell just how small they really are. Same goes with this image, but for some reason, perhaps the angle, this Kirk’s dik dik kind of gets close to illustrating their diminutive fifteen-inch height. Photographed in Samburu National Reserve in northern Kenya. Nikon Z8 with Nikkor 500mm PF lens, ISO 250, f/5.6 at 1/1600th of a second.
On the African savanna you find your fun wherever you can. In this case, two cheetah cubs found it in the form of elephant dung. A good time was had by all. Photographed in Samburu National Reserve in Kenya. Nikon Z8 with Nikkor 500mm lens, ISO 450, f/5.6 at 1/800th of a second.
Dwarf mongooses are a fairly common sight around safari camps. A bunch of them were scurrying around in the woods surrounding our camp in the Masai Mara of Kenya on our recent trip. On the technical side of things, this is a good example of a very high ISO image (12800) that has minimal noise thanks to an even and proper exposure. If I had shot at a lower ISO and then tried to lighten it in post processing, it would have had a lot more noise. Nikon Z8 with Nikkor 500mm PF lens, ISO 12800, f/5.6 at 1/320th of a second.
I started the year with a trip to northern Minnesota and got a few good looks at a northern hawk owl.
In February, I was featured on a follow-up story on Fox 61 News.
In March, I ran into a few regulars down in Florida, including a burrowing owl…
And a great blue heron with breakfast.
In April, I traveled to Peru for the second time in two years to see what I could find in the northern Amazon basin. I certainly wasn’t expecting a dark morph of a southern tamandua.
I also got great looks at sloths, including this rather hungry three-toed sloth.
On my trip to Peru in 2022, I missed out on the Uakari poison frog, but I found him this time.
I also finally found Mowgli, a rather friendly woolly monkey.
Back home in June, I found a few suburban beaver dams near my house.
And was honored to have my image of a leatherback hatchling on the cover of National Wildlife magazine’s summer issue.
We led another tour to Africa in late June/early July where I captured these rhinos on day one in Kenya.
Toward the end of the trip, it was back to Uganda for mountain gorillas, including this playful two-year old.
My camera trap continued to record all the backyard action, and in November captured this young black bear out for a stroll in the middle of the day.
Here’s to another great year in 2024.
Hope everyone had a great holiday. To get things going again, here’s a young cheetah cub taking a quick rest in-between chasing siblings across the savanna. Nikon Z8 with Nikkor 500mm PF lens, ISO 1800, f/5.6 at 1/1250th of a second.
We had a nice low vantage point on this hippo pool, which is unusual from a safari vehicle. We kept waiting for one of the hippos to show us those giant teeth but it was a relatively subdued group and they weren’t exactly cooperating. Finally this guy let out a bit of a half-hearted yawn and this was the best I could do. Photographed in the Masai Mara of Kenya on our recent trip. Nikon Z8 with Nikkor 500mm PF lens, ISO 3600, f/5.6 at 1/1250th of a second.
The yellow-billed stork is widely distributed throughout sub-Sahara Africa. That said, they exist in greater numbers in East Africa. Interesting fact about these guys — they hunt by their sense of touch rather than sight. They’ll dip their beak into the water and start moving it around until it comes in contact with prey (mostly small fish, but they also eat crustaceans, frogs, worms, insects and the occasional small mammal or bird). Once prey is detected, a rapid snap bill reflex occurs and the beak slams shut, the stork raises its head and swallows. This stork was resting along a river in the Masai Mara of Kenya. Nikon Z8 with Nikkor 500mm PF lens, ISO 280, f/5.6 at 1/2000th of a second.
Just a simple portrait of an olive baboon resting at the edge of a cliff in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve. The sun was still relatively low in the sky and when the baboon turned his head slightly, his orange eyes were illuminated by the light. Nikon Z8 with Nikkor 500mm PF lens, ISO 360, f/5.6 at 1/250th of a second.
It was a lot of fun photographing these cheetah cubs as they chased each other all over the place in Samburu National Reserve. There were four of them and we saw them on three different occasions. This was early morning as the sun was starting to make its way into the sky. Nikon Z8 with Nikkor 500mm PF lens, ISO 1100, f/5.6 at 1/1250th of a second.
When you get a dramatic sky in Kenya, it doesn’t take long to find a zebra to walk under it. Nikon D850 with Nikkor 70-200mm lens (at 200mm) ISO 800, f/2.8 at 1/640th of a second.