Wildlife Pictures
Expert wildlife photographers stake out their quarry like a hunter and wait, sometimes for days, for the perfect shot to appear. I am not one of them. But once in a while on a trout stream the wildlife photo opportunities come to me, and when I can I have my camera ready.

A whitetail deer pretends to be a moose, sticking its head underwater to graze on rich aquatic vegetation.

My dad held the canoe in place while I snapped a picture of this immature bald eagle perched in a pine over the river on an August evening. It probably caught more fish than we did.

This is the first grizzly bear I've seen. It's in Denali National Park. People with long-range binoculars, plus the view through a couple spotting scopes the park installed at this stop, verified that the little light spot my arrow is pointing to is, in fact, a grizzly bear. This is the closest view I got.

A whitetail fawn struggles through strong current to return to its mother. It lost its footing a couple times, and I thought for a moment it was going to wash down to me.

A great blue heron does a flyover on a flock of young common mergansers. I wonder how many hundreds of young trout go into the creation of a great blue heron and fifteen mergansers... hmm, where's Dick Cheney when you need him?
Photo by Elena Vayndorf.
Photo by Elena Vayndorf.

A Canada goose and gosling poke their heads out of the grass along a trout stream.

I'm breaking my rule about naming locations for this picture, since the context adds much to its meaning. This great blue heron is standing on a slab of river-worn concrete silhouetted against the NY Quickway bridge over the Beaverkill River at Cairn's Pool. Several human fishermen pursue trout from one shore while an avian fisherman pursues them from the other.

In this "close up" of a grizzly bear laying down on an alpine hillside in Denali National Park, you can almost tell it's a bear.

This porcupine seemed to be feeding on the filamentous green algae that had accumulated around the tip of a fallen cedar sweeper on a classic piece of northwoods trout water.

A family of geese take a drink from Lake Superior. They then swam out effortlessly into the high breaking waves and foiled the retrieving efforts of somebody's ambitious dog.
