A nearly straight-on look nicely shows the round eyes on the sides of the cottontail’s head that provide it with a wide field of view.

In the spring the two most easily seen mammals at Ridgefield are nutria and cottontails, neither of which are native to the Northwest, although cottontails seem to miss out on the loathing many people have for nutria. Perhaps a side benefit to being adorable.

I’ve had the most luck photographing cottontails at Ridgefield in the spring, both because they’re out in large numbers and because they are more tolerant of Boolies. Some days were dry, some days wet, but the rain dissuaded neither man nor rabbit.

I enjoy photographing in the rain so I haven’t minded the unusually wet spring here in the Northwest. This cottontail didn’t seem to mind the rain either as it ate in a meadow beside the Kiwa Trail at Ridgefield.

An eastern cottontail keeps a close eye on me

Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:18

A while back my teleconverter started overexposing everything by a stop, so I had to remember to deliberately underexpose to prevent from blowing out the image, something I often forgot to do. Being a night owl, I was particularly pleased with myself when I arrived near sunrise at Ridgefield and, when photographing this cottontail beside the auto tour, actually remembered to dial in the underexposure.

A few moments later I got my comeuppance. As I watched a muskrat swimming with its child, I realized that while I had remembered to compensate for my faulty teleconverter, I wasn’t actually using the teleconverter, so all I ended up doing was needlessly underexposing my images.

On a later visit I realized the converter was flaring badly under strong backlighting and ruined some images. Strike two.

But the coup de grâce was yet to come. While hiking along the auto tour, I watched helplessly as the camera separated from the lens and fell six feet to the muddy ground. On closer inspection it was the converter that had separated from the lens but I didn’t think much of it, I assumed I had accidentally bumped the release latch.

But it happened again a few minutes later, this time the camera clanged off the hard-packed dirt road hard enough that the batteries went flying from the flash. I suspect the teleconverter worked itself free just with the jostling motion of hiking. While the camera appears to have survived both falls with no damage save some scratches, I knew it was time to replace my old friend.

This Tamron teleconverter and my Tamrac bag are my oldest pieces of photography gear, I bought them in the early days so they’re almost 15 years old and have literally been along for every hike I’ve gone on during that time. The bag wears the crown alone from now on.

So long, old friend, and thanks for the memories.

I was watching this coyote late one spring day but couldn’t quite figure out what it was doing as it was mostly obscured in the tall grass. At first, I assumed it was hunting for voles, as I’ve seen other coyotes do in these fields. However, it kept carrying the animals it was catching over to one spot and then coming back for more. No coyote hunts voles that sucessfully, so then I thought perhaps it was ferrying its pups from one spot to another. When I saw it eat one of the animals it was carrying I knew it wasn’t carrying pups, and my third guess at what was happening turned out to be the correct one.

The natural world is a harsh one and one of the consequences is that some of my favorite creatures eat some of my favorite creatures. What I came to realize was that this coyote had found a den of rabbits and was catching all of the baby bunnies and storing them in a nearby cache, while eating a couple herself. I watched with mixed fascination and horror as the coyote bounded through the grass and landed on her prey, even as I could hear the surviving bunnies shrieking in alarm.

The coyote eventually came out of the tall grasses not far from where I was standing carrying one of the dead bunnies in her mouth. She might have have been taking the little rabbits back to feed her own, one mother’s children dying to feed another’s.