Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to travel through the national park in North Dakota that was named after the 26th President of the United States. For a time, the President lived in my home state on a ranch near what is now his namesake park.

“I have always said I would not have been President had it not been for my experience in North Dakota,” Roosevelt once noted. He first arrived in the Dakota Territory to hunt bison in 1883. The young man from New York would have the future of our country forever changed by conservation policies that were borne of his legacy.

This post, however, isn’t about Teddy Roosevelt. It’s about the descendants of the wildlife that roamed the park when he lived in the area. I’ve gathered the largest gallery of images I’ve ever shared here featuring images of wildlife I’ve encountered while traveling through the park. The opening photo features a bison bull, cow, and calf. The bison bull can be identified by a large tuft of hair on the head and the horns curve upward. Cows don’t have the extra hair on the head, and though you can’t see it in this photo, the cow’s horns curve inward with the horn tips pointing at each other.

The second image features wild horses standing on the main road through the park. As you might imagine, cars stopped and people got out to take photos of these beautiful animals.

Another common resident of the park is the prairie dog. There are several “towns” in the park where these busy rodents entertain the child in all of us. They sit up on their haunches and “bark” at passers by. If you try to get too close, they will scamper down one of the many holes. Walking around a prairie dog town is an invitation to step in a hole or on a weak spot and end up with a broken ankle or worse.

Always remember, we are visitors to these magnificent animal’s home territory. Bison appear to be gentle giants, but they are known for being short-tempered, especially if they might be concerned for the safety of a calf. If you leave your car, keep your distance and stay near your vehicle in case they charge. At least 25 yards (22 m) is a minimum to keep you safe around these animals that can weigh 2,000 lbs (900 kg) and can run at more than 40 miles per hour (64 kph).

Those same 25 yards apply for elk, bighorn sheep, moose, and other large wildlife of the prairie. The bison, though, is by far the park’s most dangerous resident. The rising number of injuries to national park visitors has been shown to be related to the use of cell phones to take photographs. The short focal length of the typical cell phone camera entices people to move closer for a “better shot.”

A study at Yellowstone National Park, another home for the American Bison, tracked 21 visitors and 4 employees injured during the study period.

20 people, or 80 percent, actively approached bison before they were hurt.

5 people, or 20 percent, didn’t back away when bison approached.

15 people, or 60 percent, were hurt when in a group of three or more people who approached bison.

12 people, or 48 percent, were hurt while photographing bison.

6 people, or 24 percent, acknowledged they were too close to bison.

You can read more about the study here.

One of the advantages of moving to Flickr is that I can actually offer you a dynamic slideshow gallery. Though right now, I cannot automatically start the slideshow, I can show you how to do it.

Click on the bison thumbnail below to open the gallery of 30 photos. In the upper right corner of the gallery, you’ll see three icons:

To start the slideshow on the album page, simply click on the leftmost icon.

Alternatively, you can manually click on any image and then manually scroll through the gallery using the arrows on the left and right of each image. I hope you enjoy my views of wildlife in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Of course, you can get to the Flickr gallery by simply clicking on any image in this post where you can scroll left and right though the gallery as well.

John Steiner

This week, Tina Schell asks us to interpret our own concept of “wild”. She focuses her camera on animals captured in the wilds of Africa, but allows the freedom to explore the other many definitions of the term as we see fit. You can read her entire challenge post here. Though I could have gone with images of “The Wild West” or “Wild in the Streets”, I decided instead to feature some wildlife from Costa Rica.

A 45 minute bus ride from the cruise ship docks at Puntarenas will bring you to a wildlife sanctuary known as Natuwa. The birds and animals there are typically recovered from the wild and are cared for as they have some disability that keeps them from living a normal life in the wild. Birds and animals are kept in enclosures, however the large number of beautiful macaws, like the one in the opening image, and other birds native to Costa Rica have found a shelter and friendly people to come and visit. In the trees above the refuge we saw many of these wild birds taking advantage of a protected area, but still living in the wild and free to come and go as they please.

Near the exit, hanging lazily in a tree, a juvenile sloth completely ignored the many people from our cruise ship who wanted a photo of this little guy. He was high enough in the tree that I had to use my 300 mm zoom lens at its maximum reach.

High in the trees above us in the sanctuary, a macaw couple rested on a branch. I have many more images captured from the sanctuary that I will be sharing in a future Travel Tuesday. This week’s challenge allowed me to provide a “teaser” preview of some of the exotic birds and animals we saw at Natuwa.

John Steiner

This week, Andrea Badgley focuses on drifters, nomads, and even the state of impermanence. “Where did it come from? How far did it travel? What stories would it tell if it could talk, and how long before it will move on again?” You can read the entire challenge post here. 

Though I enjoy photographing birds, both in flight and at rest, I am by no means an expert in the identification or even the skills required to capture these feathered transients. Sometimes I get lucky and find a bird in the wild, and sometimes, like in the opening shot, the bird is part of a raptor demonstration. In any case, these birds found themselves momentarily at rest in a location within reach of my lens. In many cases, moments after I captured their image, they were gone, off to find food or on to an adventure of which I know nothing.

The story about the photo above is one of my favorites. I spotted this Vermilion Flycatcher. Too far away and partially hidden by vegetation, he was barely visible to me. I waited, hoping he would move slightly in either direction so that I could get a clear image in my viewfinder. It was not to be. Moving on and leaving the lake shoreline, we began to cross a small clearing. A flash of red and black caught my peripheral vision and landed on a branch. I readied my camera, but just as quickly, he was gone. I don’t know if this was the same bird I saw at the lake, but fortunately, he flew across the clearing and came to rest on a tall tree stump. I grabbed a couple of quick photos, the first of which turned out to be out of focus. The second, pictured above, turned out quite well.

A few steps further along the trail, an older couple accompanied by a younger woman walked toward us on the trail. Obviously birders, equipped with cameras and binoculars, I suspected they would know the species. Excitedly I showed the image I’d captured to the older woman and asked if she knew the bird. She said it is a Vermilion Flycatcher and complemented me on the photo. She then told the younger woman that I got a really nice shot of the bird, and then explained that they have been trying to get a good shot of the bird for quite a while. The younger woman looked a bit disappointed when she came to realize that this novice was able to so easily capture what eluded them.

Though I may not know the names of all the birds in the gallery below, I submit for your review, a gallery of transient images of birds who momentarily landed in front of my lens.

John Steiner

Socorro County, New Mexico.

Last year I was introduced to the Bosque del Apache by my sister who lives in Albuquerque. The Bosque is a short 90-minute drive from Albuquerque. We spent part of a day there and had a great time capturing wildlife pictures. This year on our way back to Arizona, we stopped there again. This time I was equipped with a new camera and lens. I’ve used the Tamron 16-300 mm lens for some time with my D7000 Nikon DSLR and am pleased with its performance over the 18-270 Tamron it replaced.

This year, I purchased myself an early Christmas present, a Nikon D500. The reviews of this camera are all very positive and I must say they accurately reflect this amateur’s experience. For whatever reason, whether it’s the 20 MP sensor or better electronics in the camera, I swear the images from my 16-300 Tamron are sharper than they ever were on my D7000. At the end of this post is a link to my previous trip to the Bosque using the D7000 and 18-270 mm Tamron, and a link to my review post of the 16-300 lens.

This year’s visit to the Bosque coincided with the annual Festival of the Cranes. It is a celebration of the migration of the sandhill cranes to the Bosque. During the festival every fall, there is free admission to the Bosque and a much larger audience of visitors, most all of whom seemed to be carrying cameras with long zoom lenses, most much longer than my puny little 300 mm. I do have one advantage, though. The D500 has the smaller APS-C sensor. The smaller sensor adds a 1.5 factor to my 300 mm, making it the equivalent of a 450 mm lens on a full frame digital. Coupled with Lightroom’s ability to crop and still deliver a web-quality image for the blog, I got “close up and personal” with both snow geese and sandhill cranes.

The festival, held November 15-20, 2016 also featured some display tents with vendors selling everything from spotting scopes to telephoto lenses for your cellphone camera. Of course I had to stop at the Tamron and Sigma displays to check out their 150-600 mm long lenses. The only thing that held me back was the high price tag and the fact that I’m still recovering from the D500 purchase. Maybe next year Santa will be good to me again. We’ll see.

I promised a couple of links for you:

Last year’s gallery of images from the Bosque can be found here.

My review of the Tamron 16-300 mm lens can be found here.

The gallery of images below feature some of my favorite shots from this year’s trip to the Bosque. You may note some of the photos exhibit a pretty strong HDR effect. I do most of my shots in HDR these days, processed in Lightroom. I’m learning to use Nik’s HDR Efex Pro 2. Some of my HDR shots here are probably a bit “over-cooked”. I’m trying to learn how to make HDR Efex pro produce a more natural HDR, but sometimes I like the extra HDR “look” that Nik provides. I promise to use it sparingly as I prefer the more subtle HDR from Lightroom directly. But I digress… Click on an image in the gallery below to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

This week, Ben Huberman asks us to share something that exists harmoniously with its surroundings. He writes, “Gracefulness is a tricky quality – it manifests itself as an effortless, subtle harmony between a subject and its environment.” You can read the entire challenge post here.

In the image above, two Harris Hawks float effortlessly on the air currents as they hunt for prey. Birds on the ground can be pretty ungainly, especially some species that jut their head to and fro with every step they take. But give them some space and a little bit of sky and they can soar for hours in the sky. The gallery below features a few images captured at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum where during the cooler seasons they feature a raptor flight demonstration. Harris Hawks fly in “wolf packs”, always looking for a meal. Each bird in the family takes turns feasting on the catch. They only stop hunting when the last bird and last chick have been feed. Click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

This week’s photo challenge asks us to think ahead, maybe consider an early New Year’s resolution. Krista suggests sharing a new goal, making plans and simply imaging that new horizon. You can read the entire challenge post here. A short time ago, we headed south on our usual trip to Arizona for the winter. The normal 3-day trek expanded to 8 days as we did some sightseeing along the way, visited friends and family and most importantly for this challenge, got used to using a new tool in my photographic arsenal, a Nikon D500 camera.

In the future, I can imagine myself like the folks in the photo above, camera at the ready to capture wildlife. In this case, it’s sandhill cranes and snow geese at the Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. I need to save up some more to be able to afford one of the long lenses these photographers are using. Having said that, my Tamron 16-300mm lens does a pretty good job of capturing birds in flight.

Make no mistake, I have plenty of fuzzy, out of focus shots as I am learning to master the sophisticated auto-focus functions of the D500. I never did fully understand the focusing features of the D7000, which has now become my backup camera.

As you can see by the shot of the sandhill crane above, the focus tracking on the D500 does an excellent job, when you use it correctly. Lest you think that my goal here is to capture birds in flight, the truth is that my goal, my resolution, is to master the D500’s many focusing modes so that I can capture both action sports and wildlife shots. I know the camera is capable… now it’s time to make the photographer capable. The gallery of images below features some of my successes in selecting the right focusing mode, exposure settings and with the help of Lightroom, composition. Click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

I suspect this Sandhill Crane is thankful that he is not a turkey on this uniquely American holiday. This extra post is a sneak peek at an upcoming post featuring a trip to the Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.

A note to my blogging friends: I have been remiss in keeping up with my reading. It normally takes three days for us to travel from North Dakota to Arizona every fall. This year, we took a total of eight days, the extra days filled with stops along the way to capture images for future posts. If you missed my usual comments on your posts, fear not… I will catch up.

John Steiner

Mother Earth is our protector and is home to the shearwater chick in the opening image. This little one is protected in a small burrow in the side of a hill. Well hidden from predators, this chick’s parents can safely leave the chick and bring back a daily meal without concern. This nest was found at the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. We spent an afternoon at the refuge. You can view more photos of that visit here.

The Cattle Egret prefers the dry earth to water. Often found in the fields where cattle also find food, they have been known to ride on the back of a steer looking for a meal of ticks. This Cattle Egret was found along the shore line near the Tárcoles River in Costa Rica. You can read more about our visit to Costa Rica and view some photos of it’s abundant wildlife here.

John Steiner

Litchfield Park, Arizona.

This week, Michelle W. Asks us to share an image, “… a photo that is, or makes you feel harmonious – through your eyes.” You can read the entire challenge post here.

I featured this shot of the parrots who are obviously in a harmonious relationship. I captured this image at the Wildlife World Zoo near Phoenix, Arizona. Other images from that trip to the zoo can be found here. Of course, harmony can be expressed in many ways. This small gallery features images that I would define as harmonious in some way. Click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

Pronounced La Hoy-ah, this photographer who grew up in California was at least a dozen years old when I realized that La Jolla and La Hoya were the same place. OK, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.

On the day we visited the Cove at La Jolla, I don’t know who had the greater population, the people or the birds. As it says on the La Jolla website, the water is calm and ecologically protected… Because the water is protected, surfboards, boogie boards and other flotation devices are not permitted.

 The wildlife is abundant at the Cove. This bull sea lion was barking menacingly at another bull who was encroaching on his space. Sea Lions, Harbor Seals, Leopard Sharks, Garibaldi, Brown Pelicans and Cormorants are just a few of the wide variety of wildlife that you will find in the protected waters of the cove. Yes, you can swim with the Leopard Sharks, if you can find them. This species of shark is elusive and harmless. Adults can reach up to 6 feet (1.8 m) in length, and in the spawning season, late summer to early autumn, pregnant females are attracted to the warm water to help them in their live birthing process.

Water sports are popular pastimes, but there are those, like myself and this gentleman, who prefer to walk along the shore, resting along the way and enjoying the views.

The Cove has interesting caves and tunnels where people and wildlife explore and enjoy.  Kayakers, snorkelers and scuba divers can get up close and explore the shoreline. The only negative thing I can say about the area is that the air is pungent with the smell of the sea and the large amount of wildlife, er, ah, shall we say, residue.

The furthest beach area in the image above is the Children’s Pool. The man-made cove is a great place to take the relatives and friends from out of town. The winter and spring are great times to view newborn seal and sea lion pups.

The gallery of images below features images captured on the day we visited La Jolla Cove. Click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner