It’s been a while since the last black bear post. This youngster was photographed a few years back at about this time of year in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. I was hiking one of the park’s trails when I came across this bear, a sibling of the same age, and the mother. I watched for at least an hour as the two young bears played (and their mother made sure that I stayed a safe distance away).

Mountain bluebirds are migratory and range from as far south as Mexico in the winter, on up through Alaska in the summer. This one, a male, was in Yellowstone in late May. They are small birds that prefer open habitat and are often seen on the ground, either in the grass or on small perches like this rock. The males are a vibrant blue in color while the females are a duller blue with more grey on the chest, head and back.

Some of you might remember this fox mother and pup from a previous post. In that photo, the two were nose to nose. Just prior to that little bit of action, however, the mother was nuzzling the back of the pup’s ear. There was also a third pup to the left of the frame that made it into several other photos. It was one of those rare mornings when the light was perfect and the animals cooperated by putting on quite a show.

I was going through my files tonight and came across these two shots from Olympic National Park in Washington. In certain areas of the park, the forests can be very lush — everything covered in a coat of moss and dripping with vegetation. In the first photo, I used a 35mm focal length which eliminates any sort of extreme distortion when it comes to straight lines. In the second shot, I used a wide 17mm lens which really distorts the lines of the trees, but also creates a nice effect and sense of scale.

I captured this one on a dark morning in Yellowstone National Park (made even more dark by the fact that I was shooting into the rising sun). This was in late spring, but it had been very cold and every morning the ground was covered with frost.

I took this one a few years ago in Los Osos, California at a place called Montana De Oro State Park. There were a few of these bat stars around, tangled in the seagrass when the tide was low. The low-in-the-sky afternoon sun really saturates all the colors, as does the polarizing filter I had on my lens.

Another coyote from Griffith Park in Los Angeles. This one was howling for quite a while before two others eventually showed up. On a side note, I’ve been having a lot of issues with people not getting my posts. Hopefully I’ve worked out the problem. If you want to see any of the posts you might have missed, just click on “blog” and scroll down.

Or perhaps it’s an underbite. Either way, this bear was trying to tell me something, and I don’t think it had anything to do with dancing. As with all my polar bear pictures, this one was taken at Seal River in northern Manitoba, Canada.

Kind of like with my polar bear, snow monkey, river otter, orangutan, and meerkat photos, I’m always finding new elephant seal shots in my archives that I originally overlooked. In fact, I probably have more elephant seal photos than any other animal and it takes a while to sift through all the images to get to the ones that I like. I remember finding this large bull early one morning and trying to get shots of his breath contrasted against a dark enough background so that you could see it. Most of the shots ended up being against a bright sky, but a few, like this one, worked out the way I had hoped.

Thought I’d take a quick break from all the Africa pictures and revisit the polar bears for today’s post. These two male bears had been play fighting for about ten minutes before finally tiring out and collapsing into each other. I like the way that the bear on the left appears to be telling the other guy a secret. This was shot at Seal River in northern Manitoba, Canada.