Best of 2024

 

I'm pleased to present my favorite photo of 2024. Of course, it's a bear — a koala bear!

I read that koalas can sleep 22 of every 24 hours, but seeing it for yourself gives you a real appreciation for your snooze button. I spent hours waiting for koalas to wake for a photo on Queensland’s Magnetic Island. But apparently they are more dedicated to their craft than I am to mine. 

I hope you enjoy my favorite wildlife pics of the year.

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Grizzly cubs are constant companions in Yellowstone National Park, where I hoped to photograph winter wolves. Instead, it was bears, bears, bears.

It was T-shirt weather when I arrived to Montana. But a couple days later, it snowed eight inches and I got to photograph my first snow-faced bison. Photographing wildlife in the snow is so much fun.

I really loved seeing this beautiful red fox leaving tracks in the fresh snow.

A grizzly nuzzles her cub while looking for food along Hellroaring Creek.

The year saw a total solar eclipse that was incredible.

While koalas were relatively easy to find, duck-billed platypus eluded me for days and days in Queensland's rugged Atherton Tablelands. I ended up leaving defeated and headed to the Daintree, the world's oldest rainforest and a UNESCO world heritage site. But after spending an entire day in the rainforest without seeing much, I returned to these mountains for one last chance to find an animal that has always fascinated me. And after asking everyone I met about them, I stumbled on a friendly couple who saw them at a nearby municipal park. Fifteen minutes later, I was looking at this fellow!

Platypus are just as weird and wonderful as I imagined, with a flexible bill and webbed feet and a beaver-like tail. Males have venomous barbs on their rear legs. And they are truly at home in the water. These platypus inhabited a small park tended to by local retirees. The platypus see lots of people every day, which made them not the least bit skittish around my lens. I was so incredibly psyched to spend time watching them forage in the muddy creek. This encounter was the highlight of my trip to Queensland.

The platypus were not the only egg-laying mammals I would find in Queensland. While hiking at Magnetic Island, I came across this friendly echidna. These little anteaters belong to the same monotreme family. They have a long, sticky tongue they use to catch ants.

Instead of focusing on a park or geographic area, for my Australia trip I set the goal of photographing a handful of animals I had always wanted to see: koalas, platypus, fruit bats and cassowaries. I spent days hiking in rainforests looking for cassowaries around Mission Beach. I got lucky one night when I drove out to a farm at the edge of town to photograph wallabies in the evening sun. I just got a few pics as he strolled past my car like a velociraptor.

This animal was not on my list to try to find because they are both rare and elusive, spending most of their time high in the tree canopy. I was very lucky to see an endangered tree kangaroo while searching for platypus in the Atherton Tablelands. One of the many strangers I harassed about platypus sightings showed me the roo 60 feet high in the crown of a tree. Later in the evening, I got a better look when the kangaroo ventured to the ground.

A wallaby bounds across a field outside Mission Beach. They are surprisingly graceful when they hop.

While searching for platypus, I spied this secretive pademelon settling down for a nap in the dappled sunlight of the rainforest. In a fav episode of Bluey, a pademelon teaches the little Heeler that the creek is beautiful. And just like the show, this creek trail had leeches, too. But we don't have to talk about that.

I saw lots of wallabies but not a single red or gray kangaroo! Still, kangaroo lite here was obliging.

Mule deer are on high alert about some distant threat I couldn't perceive outside Gardiner, Montana.

I saw my first red dog, a newborn baby bison. It was just a day or two old. All elbows and knees!

Grizzly bears represent true wilderness. I was very pleased to capture this mom and her cubs in the sagebrush. 

Here be dragons. I took a boat ride on the Daintree River to photograph Australia's famed saltwater crocs. This one was trying to nap in the mangroves.

Fruit bats were high on my list of priorities for Australia. I photographed gray-headed flying foxes at two parks in Sydney. I also photographed spectacled flying foxes at Yungaburra.

Rainy, overcast skies provided diffuse light to capture these flying foxes on the wing. I could have spent the whole day there, but I had a plane for Cairns to catch.

The trill of kookaburras was the soundtrack of every B-movie set in the jungle when I was growing up. There's even one singing away in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark! So it was surreal to see them in city parks just sitting on branches. Like ... birds! 

A baby koala wakes up after a four-hour nap. Naturally, the mom and baby refused to look in my general direction at the same time, so I had to settle for a closeup of the little gremlin.

No summer in Cincinnati would be complete without a visit to Joyce Park to see the thirteen-lined ground squirrels. On a sweltering summer day, I found two babies playing in the shade of a tree. They are so tiny!

Thirteen-lined ground squirrels have one of the longest hibernations of any mammal. This baby went nose to nose with a neighbor.

It was 4 degrees when I went looking for river otters at Muscatatuck. They had to punch through the ice to breathe and sounded like whales when they took their first big breath. When I found them fishing in a frozen creek, I raced downstream and waited, hoping they would surface in view of my lens. Sure enough, I got lucky. The cold air turned this otter's wet fur into dragon scales.

A juvenile ruby-throated hummingbird sips nectar from cardinal flower at Mount Airy's Arboretum.

A groundhog is always a welcome photo subject.

Australia marked a big milestone as my seventh continent of wildlife photography. These little charmers made the trip worthwhile!