Boolie’s Blog

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.

Another picture from last October, this time of an American coot.

This weekend I edited this picture of a pied-billed grebe that I took at the end of October last year at Portland’s Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden. It reminded me that I should visit there in the next few weeks to photograph the ducks in water reflecting the fall colors, so I suppose there is one benefit to being nearly a year behind in my editing.

This doe was with her fawn on the Hurricane Hill Trail at Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. The deer there are very tolerant of people and will often pass close by on the trail as it runs along the top of the ridge. I decided to take a couple of head shots of this doe, one with her shadowed by a hill and with a backdrop of trees, and the other where she stepped a little to the right and into the sunlight. These pictures were taken a minute apart, and even though she only moved a few feet, the difference in light gives each picture its own mood. I like her pose better in the shaded picture, and also that the green background really brings out her whiskers.

I nearly had a beautiful headshot of a fawn a few minutes later right as the sun was setting, I had seen a doe and her two fawns walking near the trail and waited to see if they would cross the trail. They did, and one of the fawns looked directly at me in the beautiful light, but it ended up being closer to me than expected and I had the wrong lens mounted on the camera. By the time I switched lenses the moment was gone.

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.