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.
Another picture of the same death-defying chipmunk, in this picture it has found some seeds amongst the needles and is eating them.
A picture from Yellowstone in the summer of 2004, I’m playing around with Adobe Lightroom and am using that trip to both test the program and to re-edit some pictures.
This chipmunk was perched in a pine tree at Storm Point in Yellowstone. The tree was hanging out high over the cliffs at the edge of Yellowstone Lake. Being scared of heights myself, I could only watch in jealous admiration at how the chipmunk lept from branch to branch as easily and carelessly as if it had only been a few inches off the ground.
I suspect this is a yellow-pine chipmunk given that it was eating the seeds of the tree, but I don’t know for sure.
This is a re-edit of a picture that’s already been online for years, taken in the first week of January of 2001. In fact, it was one of my earliest pictures from when I switched to digital in Christmas of 2000.
It was near sunset at Baskett Slough as I waited to see if black-tailed deer would emerge into the golden light, but none were forthcoming so I headed back to the car to try my luck at one of the ponds before the light slipped away. By the time I got there, I was disappointed to see that the direct light was already blocked from the pond and thought my chances of getting a good picture were over. Then I noticed this great blue heron against the brilliant orange reflection of the sunset and shot a whole sequence as he slowly moved around.
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In urban areas, Oregon’s native tree squirrels have largely been replaced by eastern foxes and eastern grays.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.