Study in Blue

A blue-gray tanager is a showstopper in the rainforests of Costa Rica. Blue is an unusual color in nature, but not altogether rare. Birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and even some mammals have eye-catching blue colors. Blue is one of our favorite colors on the Blue Planet, the color of the sea and sky. Please enjoy this study in blue. 

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A strawberry poison dart frog has the nickname blue jeans frog. Like many other small rainforest frogs, its skin emits a toxic substance. La Fortuna, Costa Rica.

Morning sun cuts through the mist that gives the Smoky Mountains their name.

A blue agama lizard basks on a rock in southern Kenya. What's camouflage, you ask?

A juvenile orca rides the swells while carrying a piece of seal meat off Monterey. We spent two days with this pod and got to see two successful seal hunts.

A sleepy manatee drifts to the surface to take a breath before sinking back to the silty bottom of Homasassa Springs. The manatee was sleeping, but they're never entirely asleep. Part of their brain must be wakeful enough to come to the surface to breathe. I waited about 12 minutes between breaths to capture this picture without disturbing the manatee. Their calm demeanor is infectious. I was totally calm as well, floating at the surface while I tried not to think about water moccasins, bull sharks and alligators.

A cassowary forages at the edge of a rainforest at Mission Beach. I lucked into this sighting while photographing wallabies in a farm field across the street in the evening light. Their colors are unreal.

Blue has many variations in nature, like the baby blue of these blue waxbills in South Africa.

A total solar eclipse creates an amazing corona around the moon. The blue is a digital effect, but I like it!

Indigo buntings are perhaps America's bluest bird. They are so pretty.

If blue jays were less common, people wouldn't shut up about them. Their colors and patterns are amazing. And they're very smart, cousins to crows and ravens in the corvid family.

A red-legged honeycreeper's deep, cerulean blue is accented by bright yellow wings. This flash of bright yellow could be a defense mechanism that could startle predators in the rainforest gloom. 

Black skimmers are my favorite birds. This super-grainy shot at the end of a long day of shooting was a happy accident. It almost looks like I colored it in crayon. Not every bad picture is a bad picture!

An enormous southern stingray banks over a sandbar in Grand Cayman. I loved swimming with these gentle animals.

A melting iceberg creates a fleeting work of art off the coast of South Georgia. The moody skies accentuate the blue ice.

Several monkeys, including mandrills, have blue faces. This male vervet monkey has blue, um, somewhere else.

The blue ice-breaker Ortelius is framed against the blue sky and Southern Ocean and a jagged iceberg off Antarctica.

Aialik Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park features a craggy wall of ice hundreds of feet tall. The ice was as blue as this picture indicates on a sunny, blue morning. Incredible.