Category: mammals

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 18, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today we have photos from Ephraim Heller continuing his series on a recent trip to Namibia. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

I continue my series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems. Today’s post features the south-western black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis bicornis) and southern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum simum) of Etosha National Park and the adjacent, private Ongava Game Reserve. This is one of the most important rhino populations in Africa. In other African national parks I was happy to see one or two rhinos. On this trip I was surprised and pleased to view dozens of individuals.

[Note to readers: I have a lot of difficulty distinguishing the two species. I would appreciate corrections from experts if I have made an identification mistake.]

White rhino in morning light:

My previous posts documented Namibia’s desert coastline. Etosha National Park lies inland. The region is semi-arid with mean annual precipitation of 300-430 mm (12-17 in) and hot summers with typical temperatures around 40 °C (104°F).

Proclaimed as a reserve in 1907 by the German colonial administration and later reduced by the South Africa administration to just a quarter of its original size due to political and agricultural pressure, the park today encompasses over 22,000 km² (8,500 mi²). It is Namibia’s flagship conservation area. The park is dominated by the Etosha Pan, a ~5,000 km² (1,930 mi²) saline depression that is the remnant of an ancient inland lake.

White rhino at night. You can see the impressive scarring along its torso:

On the southern boundary of Etosha National Park lies Ongava Game Reserve, a private conservation area whose name means “rhino” in the Herero language. Starting in 1991 with the purchase of ~30,000 hectares of former cattle farmland, the Reserve’s ecology has slowly recovered. While the Park is closed to visitors at night, the Reserve caters to photographers with lodges and photo blinds overlooking illuminated waterholes.

White rhino baby nursing at the waterhole at night:

I wondered whether the two rhino species compete with each other. I learned that despite being closely related, they occupy distinct ecological niches. The mopane and mixed woodlands provide critical browse for black rhinos, and the grasslands support white rhinos.

This young male white rhino came too close to a baby. The baby’s mother inflicted this wound as a helpful reminder to respect her baby:

The southern white rhino is the larger of the two species, with adult bulls commonly exceeding 2,000 kg and occasionally approaching 3,500 kg. Despite the name, both African rhinos are grey and no one knows why are they called “white” and “black.” White rhinos are obligate grazers that crop grasses. Their large head is held low and supported by a pronounced hump at the neck.

White rhino with an impressive horn. Note the hump at the neck:

Socially they are more gregarious than black rhinos, often forming small groups of cows and calves, with territorial bulls maintaining more solitary ranges. Southern white rhinos recovered from a severe population bottleneck in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and are currently listed as Near Threatened. They disappeared from Etosha and were reintroduced in the 1990s from South Africa.

White rhino in the grass:

White rhino in dawn light. I love the ear tufts:

Black rhinos are smaller and more compact, typically weighing 800–1,400 kg. Allegedly, their most distinctive feature is the prehensile, hooked upper lip used for browsing leaves, twigs, and shoots from bushes and trees (I can’t distinguish the difference in their mouths). The head is held higher than in white rhinos, and the back shows a saddle-like dip. They are generally more solitary and can be more aggressive.

Rhinos on the way to the waterhole at dusk. I’m told that these are black rhinos, but those sure are big humps:

In the mid-20th century, remaining black rhinos from elsewhere in Namibia were relocated into Etosha. With improved protection and habitat, the population recovered strongly to over 500 black rhinos. Namibia has the south-western subspecies. Etosha is a global stronghold for this population. The species as a whole remains Critically Endangered following catastrophic declines in the 20th century.

Black rhino baby at the waterhole at night:

Poaching remains the primary threat to African rhinos. The news here is mixed. Etosha National Park has not fared well due to its large size and public management, with dozens of rhinos poached annually in recent years. On the other hand, and to their great credit, Ongava has had zero poaching incidents in recent history due to its private ownership, smaller size, and intensive security (dedicated, armed, anti-poaching teams conducting foot patrols; trained canine units; aerial support; and continuous high-tech monitoring). Tourism revenue helps fund security. Dehorning is used selectively in some high-risk areas as an additional deterrent.

This black rhino appears to be a veteran of many battles:

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 12, 2026 • 8:15 am

We’re running out of wildlife contributions—I suppose we always are, but this is the last batch on hand. You know what to do if you have good photos.

Today we continue with Ephraim Heller’s photos from a recent trip to Namibia.  Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:

Today I continue my series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems. Today’s post features the Skeleton Coast, yet another coastal desert region.

Stretching 500 km along the Atlantic, the Skeleton Coast is where the cold, nutrient-rich waters of the Benguela Current collide with the Namib Desert, producing dense coastal fogs most mornings. The indigenous San once called the region “the Land God Made in Anger.” Portuguese mariners knew it as the Gates of Hell.

The name “Skeleton Coast” has a dual origin. It first referred to the vast quantities of whale and seal bones that once littered the beaches, remnants of the 19th- and early-20th-century whaling industry. Over time the moniker also came to encompass the skeletal remains of the ships wrecked along one of the most dangerous coastlines in the world. There are about 300 recorded shipwrecks, with a total of >1,000 estimated over centuries. Persistent, dense fog reduces visibility to near zero for days at a time. Strong, unpredictable currents and heavy surf pound the beaches. Offshore rocks and poorly charted shoals lie just beneath the surface. Before modern navigation systems, the featureless desert coastline offered almost no landmarks, and any shipwrecked sailor who managed to reach shore faced a waterless, nearly lifeless desert.

One of the most dramatic wrecks occurred in late November 1942 and the story was told in the book “Skeleton Coast” (John Marsh, 1944). The British refrigerated cargo ship MV Dunedin Star, carrying passengers, crew, and war supplies, struck a submerged obstacle. The master beached the vessel about 550 yards offshore. A motor lifeboat managed to ferry 63 of the 106 passengers and crew to the desolate beach before it was disabled by the heavy surf, leaving the remaining 43 people stranded on the breaking-up ship and those ashore with almost no supplies. What followed was a >2 month rescue operation that itself was plagued by bad luck and the difficult conditions of the Skeleton Coast. Here’s a photo of the Dunedin Star (courtesy of bluestarline.org):

Within hours of the distress signal reaching Walvis Bay, the South African tug Sir Charles Elliot and the minesweeper HMSAS Nerine set out, soon joined by the cargo ships Temeraire and Manchester Division. A land convoy of trucks departed from Windhoek and crossed the roadless desert to reach the survivors on the beach.

South African Air Force Lockheed Ventura aircraft flew supply drops, many of which were swept away by the wind and currents. One aircraft landed on what appeared to be firm ground only to sink into a salt pan, becoming stranded. Several weeks later, a recovery party returned for the plane. After on-site repairs and several days of digging the plane free, they managed to get it airborne again on January 29, 1943. The aircraft flew for about 43 minutes before one of the engines failed and it crashed into the sea. The crew survived the ditching, swam ashore, and were rescued by the returning land convoy a couple of days later.

While all of the Dunedin Star passengers and crew survived and returned to port by late December, 1942, some of the rescuers did not return until early February, 1943. However, the tug Sir Charles Elliot grounded near Rocky Point while returning, with two crew members losing their lives.

Enough with the history lesson. Now for the animals:

Cape fur seals (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) are the most conspicuous animals on the coast, with breeding colonies reaching more than 100,000–200,000 individuals during the November–December peak. The colony that I saw numbered about 1,000:

Males establish and vigorously defend harems of up to ~50 females, fasting for weeks while defending territory:

We saw (and smelled) many pup carcasses. High pup mortality from stampeding, predation, and starvation is the norm. The carcasses are the primary food for scavenging jackals and hyenas:

Black-backed jackals (Lupulella mesomelas) are one of the most basal extant wolf-like canids, with a fossil record extending back 2-3 million years and relatively little morphological change since the Pleistocene. On the Skeleton Coast their diet is opportunistic: they take seal pups and afterbirth, scavenge carcasses, and hunt birds and small mammals. Their kidneys are adapted to water scarcity, allowing them to thrive where freestanding water is absent:

Brown hyenas (Parahyaena brunnea) are the rarest of the living hyenas (global population 4,000–10,000) and is listed as Near Threatened. Sightings are rare, as they are shy and nocturnal. I was very lucky:

Along the Skeleton Coast they are beachcombers, ranging long distances at night to feed on seal carcasses, abandoned pups, and whatever jackals or other predators leave behind. Their jaws and dentition crack bones that many other carnivores cannot process. They live in small, stable clans (typically 4–6 related individuals) but forage largely alone. All clan members help provision cubs at communal dens:

Just inland from the beach begin the sand dunes. In this apparently sterile environment, I found a tractrac chat (Emarginata tractrac):

I normally don’t post lodge photos, but the lodge at which I stayed was remarkable both for its architecture and isolation. At over 120 km to the nearest village and over 400 km to the nearest paved road, I believe that it may be the most remote place I have slept. The buildings have a nautical motif:

Readers’ wildlife videos

July 7, 2026 • 8:15 am

UC Davis math prof Abby Thompson usually contributes photos of the California intertidal, but today she sends us five mammal videos from her house. Abby’s captions are indented.

In a brief departure from tidepools, I bring the results of our recent trailcam experiment.     A few posts ago I mentioned that something had excavated a major tunnel system under our front yard in Northern California, with multiple large entrances.     We installed a trailcam to try to discover what it was and spent about six weeks collecting endless short videos of grasses waving in the wind, plus various deer body parts.     We decided that probably the tunnels had been abandoned and were losing hope.  But in the last few weeks (the grass got mowed, and the settings got adjusted), things picked up on the trailcam.

On 6/17 we captured a striped skunk, Mephitis mephitis, which, though charming,  was our least-favorite choice for tunnel builder :

 

Next on 6/20 a raccoon, Procyon lotor, turned up:

and then on 6/21 a black-tailed jackrabbit, Lepus californicus:

 

Really exciting, on 6/25 a bobcat, Lynx rufus strolled by:

 

And you’d have thought that was more than we could’ve hoped for, but on 6/28, we saw this:

Taxidea taxus, the American badger!  Although I still feel like I’ve never seen a wild badger in person, this was pretty close.     I don’t know if the badger really was responsible for the tunnels, but I’m happy he visited.

The camera: Fargarloo solar powered Trail Camera.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 26, 2026 • 8:30 am

We can keep going for two days after this, but if you got photos, please send ’em. Thanks.

Today’s batch is from Ephraim Heller, continuing his photos from a recent trip to Namibia. Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his pictures by clicking on them. Don’t miss the chameleon with its tongue extended!

Today I continue my series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems. My last post focused on the Namib desert. This post focuses on my next destination, Swakopmund, a cold, fog-covered town along the Namib desert’s Atlantic coast.

Annual rainfall is less than 20 mm, but the town experiences ~180 days/year of thick fog, generated offshore when the cold Benguela Current contacts warm desert air. The fog typically settles in the early morning hours and burns off by mid-morning. The fog provides moisture that enables some vegetation to grow in a strip along the ocean. In addition, there is a small, brackish estuary at the mouth of the ephemeral Swakop River that supports marine birds. This photo, taken with my iPhone on an after-dinner stroll from a restaurant to our hotel, gives you a sense of the fog:

A herd of dromedary camels (Camelus dromedarius) grazing along the shoreline often startles visitors to Swakopmund. Dromedaries are not native to Africa. The species was domesticated on the southeastern Arabian Peninsula about 4,000 years ago and has not occurred naturally in the wild for nearly 2,000 years. They were imported to Namibia by the German colonial troops in 1889 for use as military pack animals in what was then German South West Africa. The animals I saw grazing along the shore are used by a local company for tourist rides. This is a handsome individual:

However, not everyone gets to ride the camels:

The most impressive aspect of our stay in Swakopmund was a short “living desert” safari. A guide took us on a walk and drive in the sand dunes immediately around the town. Where I saw pristine sand, the guide saw the telltale marks of animals burrowed in the sand.

The first individual he unearthed was a desert sidewinding adder (Bitis peringueyi), a small, ambush predator. The one he found was about 15 cm (6 in) in length. The eyes are positioned on top of the head rather than on the sides, adapted to allow the adder to bury itself in loose sand, leaving only the eyes exposed at the surface while waiting for prey. Prey includes sand lizards and barking geckos, which also provide most of the adder’s water needs. I took these close-up photos with my macro lens – kids, don’t try this at home:

Next, our guide uncovered a buried Namib sand gecko (Pachydactylus rangei), certainly the most charismatic of the desert critters. The large feet with webbed toes are good for running on loose sand and for excavating burrows. They burrow into dunes by day to escape the heat, emerging after dark to hunt insects and spiders.

These geckos also emerge during fog events and allow droplets to condense on their skin, then lick water from their own faces and bodies. In 2021 researchers reported that P. rangei produces a neon-green biofluorescence under UV and moonlight conditions using a new mechanism in terrestrial vertebrates. I wish I had known this at the time so I could have photographed them under moonlight. Regardless, these are clearly very happy creatures:

Of course, no visit to the Namib desert dunes is complete without a FitzSimon’s burrowing skink (Typhlacontias brevipes). The FBS is blind, legless, just a few inches long, and spends its entire life burrowed in the sand. The species has reduced eyes without eyelids and no visible external ear openings. It detects prey (ants, termites, ant-lions, and small beetles) by sensing the vibrations they produce when moving through sand:

Finally, our living desert guide found surface critter: a Namaqua chameleon (Chamaeleo namaquensis). The Namaqua chameleon is one of the largest chameleons in southern Africa (up to 25 cm or 9.8 in), and unusual in the family for being terrestrial rather than arboreal. In the early morning, this chameleon darkens to near black to maximize heat uptake; as body temperature rises, it lightens toward grey-brown to reduce absorption. Water is obtained through the diet, from morning dew, and through hygroscopic skin that absorbs moisture by capillary action (wow!). Nasal salt glands excrete excess sodium chloride and potassium, allowing salts to be processed without renal water loss:

The eyes can move independently, looking in different directions:

The tail is shorter than those of arboreal chameleons, and has lost its prehensile abilities:

The guide had some mealworms with which to entice the chameleon. It’s tongue was so fast its movement was hard to see with the naked eye:

Now for the birds. First up, a colorful common waxbill (Estrilda astrild):

Next, a common but lovely speckled pigeon (Columba guinea) with an excellent hair stylist and makeup artist:

A portrait of another common but colorful bird, the helmeted guinea fowl (Numida meleagris). This one looks pensive:

We took a tourist boat cruise to see the Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) colony near Walvis Bay. The Cape fur seal population along the southwest African coast is estimated at 1.5 – 2 million animals, roughly two-thirds of which occur along the Namibian coast.

Cape fur seals are eared seals (family Otariidae) rather than true seals. Unlike true seals, which move on land by undulating their bodies, otariids can rotate their hind flippers forward and walk on all four limbs, giving them considerably more agility.

During breeding season, bulls fight to establish territories and maintain harems of 5 to 25 females. A bull may lose nearly half his body mass over the six-week breeding season without leaving his territory to feed. Mothers leave their pups on shore while they feed in the ocean. When they return to shore, mothers and pups find each other by making unique vocalizations, amazing in colonies of tens of thousands of animals.

Seal colonies on land are predated by black-backed jackals and brown hyenas, who target pups. At sea, they are preyed upon by white sharks and killer whales. Here’s a photo from the boat:

I’ll have more cape fur seal photos in a future post.

Our guide on the boat feeds fish to the great white pelicans (Pelecanus onocrotalus). While I don’t support baiting, one of the pelicans landed on the boat for its free meal, enabling me to get this portrait:

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 24, 2026 • 8:30 am

Reader Thomas sent some photos from a recent trip to Iceland. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Be sure to see the spectacular ducks, especially the King Eider! (And don’t miss the horned grebe and the fluffy-tailed Arctic fox.)

I took these photos with my Sony RX10 IV on vacation in Iceland in May/June this year. A truly beautiful country with many bird species that are hard or impossible to see back home in Europe, especially up close, in large numbers and in breeding plumage:

This male Harlequin duck (Histrionicus histrionicus) is an expert in foraging in fast-flowing, rocky streams:

Male Barrow’s goldeneye (Bucephala islandica). It also favors fast-flowing streams, though seemingly slightly calmer ones than the Harlequin duck. Within Europe, these two duck species occur only in Iceland and are two of the three or four bird species that have colonized Iceland from America (rather than Europe):

Seven male Common eiders (Somateria mollissima), and even more out of frame, hoping to curry favor with a single female. She seemed to want to be left alone, but that was not in the cards. The males followed her around, constantly making amusing ‘a-ooh-oh’ calls:

A spectacular male King eider (Somateria spectabilis). I believe it does not regularly breed on Iceland, but some of them hang around in the coastal areas, sometimes hybridizing with Common eiders (Somateria mollissima):

A male Long-tailed duck (Clangula hyemalis). Not quite in full breeding plumage as shown by the white on its breast and crown, but handsome nonetheless:

Next up the three species of jaeger (or skua) that breed on Iceland. In the order of the photos: Great skua (Stercorarius skua), Parasitic jaeger (Stercorarius parasiticus), and Long-tailed jaeger (Stercorarius longicaudus). I had never seen any of them before, so these were among the highlights of the trip. The Great skua and Parasitic jaeger behaved like a mix of a gull and a falcon. The Long-tailed jaeger on the other hand reminded me more of the Swallow-tailed kite (Elanoides forficatus) of the Americas, with its long, forked tail and elegant, relaxed wingbeats. They are rare breeders in Iceland, which made finding and observing them all the more rewarding:

A pair of European golden plovers (Pluvialis apricaria), a joy to behold. Very common on just about any field in the country, together with Black-tailed godwit (Limosa limosa), Common redshank (Tringa totanus), Common snipe (Gallinago gallinago), and Eurasian whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus):

A pair of Red-necked phalaropes (Phalaropus lobatus), with the male left and the female right. Charming little birds, often foraging literally within arm’s reach. Phalaropes have reversed sex roles. The females are slightly more brightly colored, and the males hatch the eggs and raise the young:

 

The Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica). Iceland’s iconic bird for tourist merchandise, though not its national bird, which is the Gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus) and which has unfortunately become quite scarce and was not seen by me:

Another puffin, this one dead in the beak of a Common raven (Corvus corax). The corvid clean-up crew had found a few lying dead on the beach at the bottom of a breeding site atop a cliff:

Common loon (Gavia Immer), showing off how beautiful black-and-white (with a hint of green) plumage can be:

Horned grebe (Podiceps auritus). Together with its partner it was doing its typical grebe-like courtship dance with head and neck movements. Any grebe in spring is a delight:

White-tailed eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla). They caused severe panic among all the other birds everywhere they showed up:

Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) at dusk, still largely in its white winter coat:

Reader’s wildlife photos

June 23, 2026 • 8:15 am

Why is this feature like lox and a schmear? A: Because it’s on a roll. (Sort of.) I now have a total of four sets of photos in the queue, one of which I’ll post today. But please send your good photos, and a warm handshake to those who have done so.  I hope people realize that readers who send in good add a unique feature for this website: high-quality and delightful pictures of nature. Do compliment the photographer if you like their photos.

Today we have pictures from Ephraim Heller, documenting his recent trip to Namibia. (More will be coming.) Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Today I begin a series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems.

The Namib Desert is the oldest desert on earth, with conditions that have persisted for 55 – 80 million years. At ~80,950 square km (31,250 sq mi), it is far and away the largest desert I have visited. It stretches ~2,000 km (1,200 mi) along southwest Africa’s Atlantic coast, including the entire length of Namibia. There is essentially no rain at all near the coast (2 mm/year average), but in places there is coastal fog that is the primary source of water for the desert plants. The stable climate over millions of years has resulted in high endemism. Of the ~3,500 documented species in the Namib, more than 1,000 are endemics.1-2. On the drive from the capital, Windhoek, visitors pass through Solitaire. It consists of a fuel station, a bakery and café, a general store, a small lodge, and a yard decorated with old vehicles. The nearest real town is hundreds of kilometers distant. When vehicles broke down, cars and trucks were simply left. Some of the collection includes American classics from the mid-twentieth century:

While having lunch at a picnic table in Solitaire, I observed several yellow mongooses (Cynictis penicillata) playing. Technically, Solitaire is semi-desert, so there are a few shrubs for the mongoose. They often share burrow systems with the local ground squirrels (Xerus inauris), which confused me as I tried to decide if I was seeing mongooses or ground squirrels. This is a mongoose:

Our destination in the Namib desert was Sossusvlei, where the sand dunes are among the highest in the world. “Dune 7” dune, the tallest, is 388 m (1,273 ft) in height. Vlei is the Afrikaans word for “marsh,” while sossus is Nama for “no return” or “dead end”.  The area is the drainage basin for the ephemeral Tsauchab river. The Namib Sand Sea, of which the Sossusvlei dune field is a part, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The dunes began forming around five million years ago. Sand from the Orange River was carried west into the Atlantic, swept north by the Benguela Current, then driven back inland by the prevailing south-southwest winds. Over millions of years the sand accumulated into a dune field ~32,000 sq km (12,400 sq mi) in extent. The sand is iron-oxide coated quartz, and younger sand near the base of dunes is paler while older sand higher up is a deeper reddish-orange, due to greater oxidation. The colors in these photos are real, and not simply me going wild with the saturation slider in my photo editing software. For scale, note the full-grown trees at the base of the dune in the first photo.

About a kilometer walk across the sand lies a small clay pan named Deadvlei (meaning “dead marsh”) where reside camelthorn trees (Vachellia erioloba) that have been dead for 600 – 900 years. There has been no water here since the fourteenth century! The combination of extreme dryness and intense heat inhibits microbial activity so thoroughly that the wood is preserved.

Gemsbok (Oryx gazella) and springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis) antelope are the primary large mammals of the Namib. Gemsbok can survive for extended periods without drinking free-standing water, meeting their requirements through vegetation. Here is a gemsbok in its habitat:

Here is a herd of springbok in their environment:

Toktokkie beetles (Onymacris unguicularis) are a group of darkling beetles with over 200 species in Namibia, and 20 in the Namib desert. We saw them throughout Namibia. I don’t know the species of this individual, but some species engage in fog-harvesting: when Atlantic fog rolls in, beetles climb to the crests of dunes and orient head-downward, body inclined away from the wind. Water condenses on the elytra, runs along ridges on the beetle’s back, and reaches the mouthparts. A beetle can take in water equivalent to ~40% of its body mass from a single fog event.

The garden locust or tree locust (Acanthacris ruficornis), is widespread across sub-Saharan Africa. Tt is technically a grasshopper:

Namaqua doves (Oena capensis) are ubiquitous, but I think they are pretty. They are the smallest doves on the African continent:

The Kalahari tree skink (Trachylepis spilogaster). I had no idea that some skinks are arboreal:

The extreme dryness and very low population density of Namibia make it one of the prime sites for astronomical observatories and night sky photographers:

Readers’ wildlife videos

June 22, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today we have two videos from Tara Tanaka, who has been absent a while due to a drought Florida that dried up much of the wetlands on the family property, creating an absence of wading birds that she used to feature. Fortunately, as she writes below, the drought may be over.  In the meantime, we have a kayaking video and a video featuring a BOBCAT.

Tara also has a Vimeo site and a  Flickr site.  Her narration below is indetned:

In 2024 when we had a swamp full of water, we got a sit-on-top kayak that I could use to shoot from and that my husband could use to get out into the swamp to manage exotic plants.  I chose this one because it’s incredibly stable, and I wanted an open deck to be able to paddle without having the camera in front of me.   This kayak has a seat that swivels 360 degrees, allowing me to mount my tripod with a 500mm lens in the stern, and then just pivot around between paddling and videoing.  This was the maiden voyage in our Nucanoe kayak. 

I was able to make quite a few trips out during the 2024 nesting season, and after a relatively dry winter and then one good rain, made a few trips out in 2025.  I stopped going out not because there wasn’t enough water to float the kayak, but because it was getting so shallow and our alligators that patrol the rookery for raccoons and snakes are so big that I didn’t feel comfortable paddling right over one with just a couple of feet between us.  It wasn’t long after that that a couple in a canoe in Lake Kissimmee paddled over an 11’ gator in 2’ of water causing the gator to thrash and overturn the canoe, with a tragic ending. 

The swamp has been dry for at least 9 months, with only a few pools of water, and now that it’s really starting to rain I’m hoping that the water level will return to normal and the birds will return to nest next spring. 

A 5-minute YouTube video, narrated by Tara, showing the maiden voyage of the canoe (sound up.)  You can see there are still birds around. Can you identify them?

And here’s a Vimeo video with an animal encounter. Enlarge this as you can see a lot more detail on full screen.

We had seen one or two coyotes around 9:30 the last two mornings. Hoping they would return for a third day. I got my camera ready in the living room to try to record them. About 9:00 my husband said he saw one, so I made some final adjustments for the lighting and began to search for something moving in the distance. When I finally centered the subject in the viewfinder, I said “I think I’m looking at a bobcat.” Almost immediately the cat stood up and as I panned with it I was shocked when two coyotes ran into the frame, one on each side of the cat. Enjoy the interactions between the two species and between the very bonded pair of coyotes. I believe the female is pregnant.

After I finished filming I just sat in disbelief that I had had the opportunity to record something so unique – and from my living room! I feel like I could have gone to Yellowstone and spent a month in the field and not witnessed an encounter like this. Because of the dramatic temperature difference between the thawing ground and the sun heating the brown grass, the waves of heat shimmer intensified as the sun got higher and you can see them rippling across the screen. Despite the extreme conditions, I was thrilled that I was able to record the interaction so clearly from 1000’ away, and through a double-paned window.

We should have a pond full of water with waders arriving to nest right now, however due to a severe drought that started over a year ago the entire swamp is dry. Without water to allow our large alligators to patrol under the nests and protect them from predators, I’m afraid that our hundreds of waders that nest here every year will not feel safe and will likely nest elsewhere.

Filmed with a Panasonic GH6 + Nikon 500mm f2.8 lens. Since I filmed it from inside the house, I used the audio from a video I shot from the yard last year.