This here is a California newt, also known as an orange bellied newt. These guys are pretty big for newts, growing to 8 inches in length. It was somewhat rare to come across one on land because it’s breeding season and although they are land dwelling for most of the year, they stay in the water from December to early May when they are taking care of business. They also happen to be highly toxic and if ingested can kill you. I made sure not to eat him.
No animals in this one, just a simple country road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. This was early in the morning in a part of the park called Cade’s Cove, an area of open fields that provide one of the best places in the country to view black bears in the wild.
Badlands National Park in South Dakota is one of my favorite places in the US. There’s plenty of wildlife, and also great landscape opportunities pretty much everywhere in the park. This photo was taken late one afternoon just before a rainstorm. The desert sunflowers were in bloom and everywhere along the roadside.
As anyone who has been to Bosque Del Apache in New Mexico knows, getting shots of sandhill cranes isn’t difficult. With so many cranes, it’s easy to experiment with different exposures/shutter speeds, angles, etc. What I was trying to do with this particular photo was to use a slower shutter speed to capture the blurred movement of the bird in flight.
Here’s another shot from Machias Seal Island off the coast of Maine. I liked the little guy up on the rock trying to get a look at the action below.
This bird is called a marbled godwit. I photographed it just north of Monterey at a place called Elkhorn Slough in the town of Moss Landing. The light was perfect that day and I was able to lay face down on the beach, and place the camera on the ground, to get the lowest angle possible — always my favorite way to photograph birds on the ground and other small animals.
I guess I should have posted this guy last Sunday. This is a cottontail rabbit, common throughout most of the US. I photographed this one at a place called Bluff Lake near the old Stapleton Airport in Denver. At dawn and dusk cottontails are always out foraging around and I certainly come across a lot of them when I’m driving around the country.
In honor of finally selling my house in Michigan this past week (been on the market for two years) I figured I’d post one more shot of the squirrel that used to hang out just outside my home office window. On hot summer days, it would emerge from its hole in the tree and just hang there lazily on the branch, as if exhausted.
I had been to the Fort Myers, Florida area several times to photograph birds out on Sanibel Island. Each time, I drove right past the town of Cape Coral not knowing that it was a hotspot for burrowing owls. Last time I was there, I stumbled upon an article on the owls and decided to look around. Every inch of Cape Coral seems to be developed with suburban sprawl. Still, the owls find places to build nests — be it in homeowners yards, or small plots of grass adjacent to strip malls, gas stations and Walmarts. Luckily, the residents seem to take it as a badge of honor if a pair of owls digs out a nest in their yard and they do all they can to protect them from harm. Of course, it also helps that they are federally protected. When I was there it was mostly overcast, but then suddenly a little bit of late day sun poked through and I got this shot.