Mammals – Page 11

Looking Up

Red Rocks

I came across this pika in red rocks somewhere in the Sunrise area of Mount Rainier National Park during my trip in 2008. I say somewhere because for whatever reason I didn’t edit the original picture back then, so it never got added to my now defunct photo site and thus I never wrote about it. While the complete old site will never return, even in the blog there are 915 posts still offline, waiting for pictures to be re-edited and uploaded to Flickr. I’m keenly aware how dependent I am on Flickr for hosting my images and how even the rebuilt blog will go away if something happens to them. Over the years I’ve tried to think of a better solution where I’d be less dependent on the whims of other companies, on things outside my control, but I haven’t thought of one. Flickr doesn’t replicate my old site but it is better in many ways and provides a lot of functionality I can’t easily provide here.

The Meadow

A bear searches for food. A rain falls in fall. A meadow before the mountain.

Eastern Fox Squirrel

An eastern fox squirrel sits on a park bench in Irving Park on a foggy December day. We have two species of tree squirrel you frequently see in the city, foxes and eastern grays, neither is native. We have native squirrels in our forests but I’ve rarely seen them.

Whiskers and Claws

The dramatic pose of this stretching harbor seal shows off the claws on each of the toes of its flippers, as well as the network of whiskers that help it navigate its environment as it swims.

Wave Rider

Don’t Look Back

Harbor seals use multiple techniques to slip past these waves, wave after wave, as they play and feed just offshore in the Pacific. I spent hours watching them and could have spent days, it’s mesmerizing how naturally they move about this environment.

A Bed of Tide Pools

While I was watching a larger harbor seal that was perched nearby, this smaller one climbed up onto higher ground for a little extra rest as the sun rose, before the incoming tide took away even this, its bed of tide pools.

Trixie by the Seaside

The mottled coloring of this harbor seal at Yaquina Head reminded me of our tortoiseshell cat Trixie, who I would see shortly, as this was the last day of my short trip to the coast.

Ro-Ro-Rosie

There have been multiple generations of Rosies in Yellowstone, a name given to a line of female bears that has stayed near the Roosevelt area. According to a park ranger on my fall visit in 2006, the previous Rosie didn’t appear to have survived the winter, she had lost a lot of fur before she hibernated. The new Rosie was a fine mother, looking carefully after her two cubs (who were following her just out of frame). She’d been tagged in her ears to help identify her, although its hard to tell in this picture since it matches the bits of brown leaves in her fur. The picture was a bit of a nod to wildlife photographer Nick Nichols, whose work in National Geographic inspired me. The light was low and the bear moving, so I tried to capture the movement with a low shutter speed and panning with the bear instead of trying to go for sharpness and freezing its motion. A technique Nick did well but I did not, but I still enjoyed the moment.