Best of 2019

 

A beautiful chocolate grizzly digs up roots along Sable Pass in Denali National Park. Fall is a fantastic time to look for bears in Denali because they're busy digging up ripe berries and roots on the open tundra scrub. During one memorable hike down Sable Pass, I saw five distant grizzlies up on the ridges and two-year-old twin bears sleeping in the bushes near the road. I cut my hike short and went the other way until a park bus came along to pick me up. Safety first! I'm revisiting my favorite photos here after Shutterfly disbanded its shared websites, including mine. Watching this young grizzly forage in the sun (from the park bus) was my favorite wildlife moment of 2019. Of course, I picked a bear!

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These roseate spoonbills deserve an honorable mention for 2019. I was able to capture these gorgeous birds in good morning light at Merritt Island, Florida.

A finback whale was the highlight of a visit to Alaska's Chiswell Islands, beautiful mountaintops in the ocean at the edge of Kenai Fjords National Park. Getting this far out into the Gulf of Alaska was a treat. These forested islands were straight out of Jurassic Park. What a cool place.

The fall colors of Alaska are completely unreal. This bull caribou reigns over the tundra scrub. Denali is truly my happy place.

A big mama grizzly (the mom of the grizzly at the top) walks along the gravel park road. Look at the size of those claws! She's a beautiful bear.

A caribou picks its way across a glacial creek. Denali has a resident population.

If you like bunnies, you will love snowshoe bunnies. They're the biggest rabbits I've ever seen. This one near the Denali nature trail was starting to turn white from the ground up in anticipation of the coming winter. 

Polychrome Pass in Denali is a good place to look for one of Alaska's coolest small animals, the collared pika. From these lofty heights, you have the unusual vantage point of looking down at the boulders and rock scree. I'm a big fan of these enterprising rock rabbits. They don't hibernate, so they must gather enough seeds and grasses to last the long, long Denali winter. Hey, back to work!

Arctic ground squirrels are super common in Denali. While these animals do hibernate, they stay busy running to and fro to eat flowers, seeds and grasses.

An enormous Alaskan moose can reach tender leaves more than eight feet above the ground. They are huge. I have been lucky to spend a lot of time with moose in Alaska and Yellowstone. They can be extremely dangerous depending on the time of year. People come to Denali from all over the world to see moose each fall.

A big bull moose is dwarfed by the Alaskan landscape.

An orca hunts sea lions in Kenai Fjords National Park. One terrified and panicked sea lion tried to jump over the railing of our whale-watch boat 10 feet above the water line. If it had succeeded, it may have killed some of the tourists standing at the railings. The killer whales were unsuccessful on this outing, but the sea lion didn't leave the shadow of the boat until the orcas moved on.

A Steller sea lion gives me the side-eye in Kenai Fjords National Park.

Harbor seals rest on pack ice in Kenai Fjords National Park. The ice occasionally calves off glaciers, but it never lasts. The next day, all the ice was gone — and so were the seals! 

I was lucky to find a fox den in 2019.

The fox kits were all about play, chasing each other and wrestling around while mom and dad were out hunting.

I also spent some time in Florida, where I found this gator on the dark waters of the Corkscrew Swamp. What a great place that is. Its boardwalks provide excellent access to the marshes. And the trees are full of painted buntings and other beautiful birds.

I went to Florida to look for burrowing owls at Cape Coral. These might be the angriest birds in America. Maybe you just have to get to know them.

If you are in Cape Coral, it's hard to miss the resident monk parakeets. These loud, screeching birds are fun to watch in some of the municipal parks.

Painted buntings use all the crayons in the box!

Florida scrub jays are threatened with extinction.

A little rail called a sora forages along a pond's edge at Fernald. I haven't seen any there the last couple winters. They are pretty elusive in the marsh reeds.