This is the same pika that I denied a taste of my mango, as you can see it was quite adept at finding food on its own. It had just sprinted across the talus field with these twigs in its mouth, it paused for a moment and straddled these rocks before disappearing below.

“Hey everybody, Boolie is a rat fink who won’t share his mango!”

In the interest of full disclosure, while pikas are vocal little things this one isn’t calling out, it’s finishing up some of the plants it was eating. In pika society it’s OK to chew with your mouth open.

Ever since first seeing pikas in the Tetons, I always choose some of my hikes on my Wyoming trips to go into terrain where I might glimpse these little mammals. So it should be no surprise that I chose many of my hikes on my trip to Mount Rainier to put me into the land of marmots and pikas. At first I had only near misses at pictures as pikas scampered along the Sourdough Ridge Trail, dragging plants down into their homes under the rocks. But at the end of my first full day of hiking, the Palisades Lakes Trail blessed me in abundance.

I stopped at a talus field near the end of the trail for some water and snacks, hoping that a pika might poke its head out from the rocks while I rested. I had heard but not seen them in the area as I passed by at the start of the hike, but it wasn’t long after I opened my water bottle that this pika first appeared. It was busy adding plants to its cache under the rocks, occasionally stopping to eat a little. I took a number of pictures while it was active, spending almost half an hour watching it as it gathered food. During the stretches where it was out of sight, I swapped the camera for my water bottles.

I took me a while to quench my thirst as I picked up the camera any time the pika popped up, but eventually during a quiet stretch I turned my attention to my hunger and brought out my bag of snacks. We had picked up some dried mango slices shortly before I left, I had never tried them before but they immediately became my favorite treat of the trip. As I started into the mango the pika suddenly reappeared, so I closed up the bag and set it a nearby rock before picking up the camera for more pictures.

The pika kept ducking in and out of the rocks, classic pika behavior, but I could hardly believe my eyes when I realized that the pika was actually working its way in my direction. The little thing was soon too close for pictures so I just stood baffled by such a close encounter. I soon realized its intention as it shuffled over towards my snack bag and sniffed around. I eased over and took the bag away, having just watched it store away a variety of plant life I feared my dried fruit was about to be added to the cache and enjoyed all winter long by my furry friend.

It hung around for a little while, almost at arm’s reach but always with an escape route into the rocks. The timing was probably coincidence, but when I finished the mango it either lost interest in the remaining fruit or realized I wasn’t going to share and headed back up the slope. I finished my snack and hoped for more pictures, but it wasn’t long before the pika went under for good and I continued up the trail.

I couldn’t help but feel guilty about not sharing my bounty, given that it posed for so many pictures, but better to keep them wild. Besides I knew from our time together that it wasn’t going to go hungry this winter, even if it was going to have to miss out on the mango.

A hoary marmot at the end of Mount Rainier’s Summerland Trail eeks out the last bit of warmth from this sunlit rock before the mountains blocked the sun and threw its perch into shadow.

This golden-mantled ground squirrel was another creature at Mount Rainier busy eating as much as possible. It was almost reckless as it sprinted around looking for seeds in the grasses beside the Pinnacle Peak Trail in the Paradise section of the park. I was able to get a variety of pictures before it exhausted the supply of seeds in this little patch and sprinted off to another location.

From this headshot you can see one easy way to distinguish this type of ground squirrel from a chipmunk: a chipmunk has stripes on its face, while the ground squirrel does not.

Despite my whimsical post about how my trip to Washington started, this is literally the first picture of my trip. After driving through rain from Portland to Mount Rainier, I had a couple of hours before sunset so I stopped in the Sunrise area of the park to hike a bit on the Sourdough Ridge Trail. I donned all of my wet weather gear and wrapped my camera and lenses in plastic bags before putting them in my camera bag.

As I climbed up the trail the wind picked up and as I got further along the trail towards Frozen Lake, the rain turned to snow that bit me hard in the face. Despite the nasty weather my spirits were high when I spotted an unusual rock at the side of the trail. A second look turned the rock into a hoary marmot that was standing on its hind legs, my first look at this species and posing in what would have made a beautiful picture.

Would have made a beautiful picture, but since my cameras were safe and dry inside my camera bag, I couldn’t take its picture. I decided to risk the weather and got the camera out and attached the lens, but by this time the marmot had stopped posing and was walking to a different part of the talus field. It did stop for a moment before disappearing under the rocks, so I was able to get this picture (and a few others zoomed in a bit more, but I like how this picture shows the driving rain).

I decided then and there to risk having the camera out in the rain, I covered it with a plastic bag as best I could and tried to keep it as dry. It was my first few hours into a 9 day trip and a bit of a risk, but I felt it was worth it after having missed what would have been one of my favorite pictures of the year.

It turned out to be the right decision, I saw four grouse (including this one) on the way back down the trail. I had to shoot in the rain off and on during the trip but kept the same philosophy, being careful but not careless, and I was fortunate not to have any cameras die on me. My 100-400mm lens is showing some problems and may have to be sent in for repairs, but not because of the rain.

Canon’s newer mid-range cameras have more gaskets on them than mine do, but they still don’t put them as many places as they should. Gaskets and o-rings can crack and shrink and leak over time, so you can’t completely rely on them to keep water out of your camera, but when you’re out on the trail and out in the rain, you’ll take every bit of help you can get.

If you’ve followed my blog for a while and have a photographic memory, this picture will seem a little familiar. It certainly seemed familiar to me when I took it. This view of a sooty grouse is very similar to a picture I took last year of a dusky grouse while in the Tetons. Not exactly the same of course, the head is turned at a different angle and the light and colors are different, but I certainly had the older picture in mind when I took this one.

Sooty and dusky grouse used to be considered two races of one species, blue grouse, but were recently split into separate species. Here in the Northwest, the sooty grouse tend to be in the areas from the Cascades and west to the coast, while duskies tend to be in the eastern interior.

This picture is from the Sourdough Ridge Trail in the Sunrise area of Mount Rainier National Park, the trail where I saw grouse the most often. I also saw them down by the Paradise Inn, and saw one in Olympic National Park at the end of my trip.

That last encounter in the Olympics was the most like my experience with the grouse I photographed in the Tetons, I was driving out of the park when I saw one in the road in front of me. I stopped the car and turned on my hazard lights, as the bird was moving slowly and in no hurry to get out of the way. I got out of my car and encouraged it to hurry across the road, which is fortunate as a pickup came driving past right afterwards.

That’s twice now I’ve played crossing guard for grouse.

When I think of bird feathers, I usually think of the large wing feathers. But birds have feathers of all sizes, and one of the fun things about close-up pictures like this is getting to see the individual feathers of all sizes. For example, although the eye ring of this sooty grouse looks like a solid band of white from a distance, up close you can see that it is actually a ring of tiny little white feathers.

I got to photograph grouse on several occasions on this trip, but this picture is my favorite.

I played around with some headshots of wildlife this past winter and decided to do the same while hiking on my trip to Washington. Since I was out on the trails the whole time (and usually without my longest lens), most of my headshots were of mammals like marmots, squirrels, deer, and elk. I didn’t see too many birds on this trip and the ones I did see were not close enough to isolate just the head.

After driving in the rain all day to get to Mount Rainier, I had a couple of hours before sunset. I started up the Sourdough Ridge Trail to Frozen Lake, hiking in a cold wind and rain and sometimes snow, fearing that the weather had turned and I had waited one week too long to start my trip.

But then I saw a hoary marmot near the trail and my mood brightened considerably. After reaching Frozen Lake I headed back down the trail and saw my second surprise of the short hike, four sooty grouse that were near the trail. They were remarkably tolerant of my presence so I knelt or sat on the ground to get at their eye level and slowly moved with them as they fed along the trail. At times they literally walked beside and around me, I’d be photographing one of them and would turn around and see another just inches away from me.

You can see the drops of water on the grouse’s feathers, although nothing in the shot indicates how cold it was getting. My gloves were the one part of my outfit that weren’t waterproof, so by this time my hands were wet and cold enough that I fumbled a bit with my camera. Knowing that it was about to get dark and needing to warm my hands, I reluctantly said goodbye to the four and headed back to the car.

I’d see them again the following morning and get pictures I like even more than this one, but I’ll save those for another post.

The first of many pictures from my recent trip to Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks, pictures should be coming online slowly over the next few weeks. It’s been slow going partly because of the large number of pictures to sort through, partly because Sam and Scout have been curling up on me and keeping me from working at my computer, and partly because work has been busy and stressful since I got back.

This is a hoary marmot on Mount Rainier’s Skyline Trail, taken shortly before I left the park on my last morning there. The marmot gets its name from the silvery white fur that covers its nose and parts of its body (the exact coloration varies from marmot to marmot).

I don’t shave on my weeklong fall hiking trips, a little tradition I started back in 2004 to save precious moments in the morning. A quick look at my whiskers showed that the marmots weren’t the only ones sporting silvery white hairs. At first this seemed an unmistakable sign I’m getting older, but I quickly realized they were more likely due to the same environmental conditions that create the white fur in the marmots. Maybe it’s the altitude, something in the water, who knows.

They have nothing to do with me turning 40 this year, of that I’m certain.

It’s usually pretty hard to provide a sense of place in a close-up portrait, but this intimate portrait of an elk cow strongly hints at Yellowstone with the burned and broken tree in the background. It was indeed taken near the Madison River in Yellowstone, she was part of a herd that was resting in the rain.

After visiting Yellowstone each year from 2004 to 2007, I’m not going to make it in 2008. It was a hard decision not to go, not only because I have such a good time there, but also because the elk get so excited when they see me.

A killdeer walks along the white mineral deposits at Mammoth Hot Springs at Yellowstone National Park. Elk had walked through a neighboring section and left hoofprints in the fragile crust, the killdeer would sit down in them for a while like they were its own personal sauna.

Yesterday after work I went to Tualatin Hills Nature Park in Beaverton. I haven’t been hiking in quite a while and wanted a little change. I took the big lens and tripod with me and two hours later it was pretty obvious I wasn’t in the best hiking shape. I went to bed more than a little sore but thankful for the time in the outdoors.

In urban areas, Oregon’s native tree squirrels have largely been replaced by eastern foxes and eastern grays. And while I saw eastern foxes yesterday, it was the black stripe of this squirrel that immediately grabbed my attention. This is a Douglas’ squirrel, a native here in the Northwest that I hadn’t expected to see in a city park. Tualatin Hills is heavily forested, so apparently these squirrels are able to share their habitat with the more aggressive squirrels from the east.

This squirrel’s handiwork was everywhere, there were little middens of soft scales from the cones all along this section of the trail. They pull apart the cones to get at the seed inside, like the one being eaten in the picture. Given the many piles scattered here and there, this shy creature seemed to be pretty well fed.

I’ve posted a picture of this chipmunk before, taken in Yellowstone last fall, but this time in a vertical format that I like a little better.

In much of eastern America, there is only one species of chipmunk, the aptly named eastern chipmunk. In western America, however, there are a large number of different species and many of them look alike. In some areas, the species don’t overlap so you can make an ID just from its location and habitat. But in areas where they overlap, there are some general coloration traits between the species but definitive identification is difficult. Apparently the penis bone of the males is the only way to be sure, but I don’t get to know my wildlife subjects that well.

I think this may be a yellow-pine chipmunk but I don’t know for sure.

Speaking of pictures from Yellowstone in 2004, this white pelican soared overhead while I walked the cliffs above Yellowstone Lake along Storm Point Trail. I had seen a flock of them earlier on the nearby (and aptly named) Pelican Creek Trail, my first ever glimpse of white pelicans.

I would get my third glimpse at Ridgefield when a small flock rested there for a bit before continuing their migration.

Another barn swallow picture from two months ago, the male brought in some building material (this time, sans mud).

Adobe just released an updated version of their raw file converter, with some new options for color profiles. I’m playing around with a few new and older images like this one to test out the changes. So far I like what I see.

The bigger news for me was the release of the second major version of Lightroom, which seems to address some of the problems that kept me from purchasing the first version. To test out the eval version, I’d like to sort and edit some images from Yellowstone in 2004 and 2005, which are ripe for a re-editing anyway.

It’s exciting to see how far the software tools have come since my first days of digital photography in December of 2000. It’s also exciting to see how far computers have evolved, the difference between my little MacBook and the desktop I was using back then is astonishing.

There’s a tiny little island at Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina where I’ve photographed alligators, snowy egrets, great egrets, little blue herons, and least terns. On this occasion last summer, I just wanted a snapshot of the island itself since I knew it might be my last visit to the park.

I had focused on the animals when the light was nice early in the morning, so when the light was less nice I took a bunch of pictures to stitch together to create a panorama of the island – and as a bonus, there were a handful of alligators on the island, larger ones on the left and youngsters on the right, plus a snowy egret to top it all off.

Following up the previous post about photographing a marsh wren that closed its eyes, the top picture here was literally the next picture in the sequence, so by taking a short burst I got a nice picture even if the first picture didn’t turn out quite like I hoped.

The rest of the pictures are of the same bird on the same cattail, taken with slightly different backgrounds (either because I moved or the wind moved the bird). I was trying to capture the colors of this tiny little marsh in the background, the green of the grasses and the browns of the cattails, but also took a few pictures with a cleaner mostly green background.

When putting pictures on my web site, I have to winnow down the similar pictures into one or two selects. I had more than these four to choose from, but these are representative of the others. In this case, even though I like them all, the second is probably my favorite, followed by the fourth.

The pictures were all taken from a footbridge on Ridgefield’s Kiwa Trail, I had gone to photograph some barn swallows that were building a nest under the bridge, but this little wren showed up as well and proved an irresistible target.