Best of 2025

Some of my happiest times have been spent looking for lions. Few photo subjects are more exciting. So it's no surprise that this portrait I captured in Kruger in January was my favorite photo of 2025. I hope you enjoy the rest.

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Thirteen-lined ground squirrels are Ohio's prairie dogs. These tiny, social animals live in a colony at the soccer fields of Joyce Park, where they feed on clover and bark warnings to each other all day.

Spring at Fernald found this young snapping turtle doing his best impression of a Galapagos tortoise.

I found bobcat tracks twice this year at Fernald. The bob-tailed cat that left them is still a phantom.

This American redstart makes the list because they only sit still for 1.3 seconds at a time and I was happy to get even one photo that was in focus.

A painted dog puppy gets a bath from its mom. I only took one photo trip this year. I don't think 2026 will be much better with the price of airfare. I got to follow this family of wild dogs on a morning hunt.

This was my fav pic with the dogs. One found this downed branch and began playing with a stick and suddenly all the litter mates wanted a stick, too. They're still puppies, after all.

Two young stallions play fight just north of Crocodile Bridge. I spent a lot of time photographing zebras on this trip. Zebras can be shy around people, so you often get zebra butt as they head off into the scrub. This was the first time I had ever seen a zebra rear up on its back feet. I went with B&W to create some contrast with the impossible washed-out midday light.

A lioness watches the sun rise over the grasslands.

The size of a red squirrel, a lesser bushbaby perches on its front porch high in a tree at Malelane. This is one of just a handful of primates in the park. When it got dark, I saw the bushbaby leap 10 feet at a bound from branch to branch. In the light of my headlamp, its eyes were golden fireworks streaking across the tree canopy. 

Another pint-sized predator is the dwarf mongoose. These tiny siblings wrestled like bear cubs. I also saw several slender mongoose and a genet. But the small animals were pretty scarce on this trip.

A baby elephant is still trying to learn how to use its tiny trunk. I steered well clear of elephants. 

 

It can be hard to photograph elephants because of their proportions. I like how the setting sun illuminated every clod of dirt and wrinkle on this old bull.

The soft evening light was perfect during a night game drive. 

A baby vervet monkey nibbles leaves like her mom even if she's still too young to eat solid food. I expected to find vervet monkeys at the Berg en Dal rest camp and was not disappointed. The parking lot was deserted mid-morning. I stupidly left the windows down in my rental and his older cousins led a raiding party on the groceries in the back seat. But the monkeys were too bold! I quickly shooed them away. If they had waited a minute longer, I no doubt would have been distracted and they could have helped themselves to my blueberry muffins, bananas and Flamin' Hot cheese puffs.

A pretty nyala poses for a pic. Kruger has more than 20 species of antelope.

These wood hoopoes were the birds of the year for me. Very cool sighting.

A lion cub chills with his littermates. This pride consisted of two lionesses with 11 cubs all the same age. And they all needed a good meal.

Elephants return from a refreshing dunk in a waterhole on another sweltering summer day.

I had a couple uncomfortably close encounters with elephants, despite going well out of my way to avoid them. In one instance, I was stopped in traffic surrounded by thick brush while a mega-herd of more than 100 elephants crossed the road ahead of me. Suddenly, a mom and her baby exploded through the brush. They clambered up the hill onto the road next to my SUV, filling my side window with four tons of annoyed, trumpeting outrage. I had nowhere to go, so I just had to hold my breath while I waited for the elephant's next move. Luckily for me, she regained her composure led her baby past my car without incident.

Another time, I was on an evening game drive when we were stopped in our tracks by a large bull elephant that was defending the road. The bull wouldn't let any cars come or go. This went on for about 45 minutes. Many of the delivery vehicles lining up behind us were trying to exit the park before dark. And the sun was quickly sinking behind the trees. Our guide decided to break the siege. He gunned the big diesel engine of the 2.5-ton safari truck and inched forward. The bull grudgingly surrendered the road.

Our safari truck stood sentinel while cars in both directions took the opportunity to pass safely. Then it was our turn and we inched past the elephant. But our cheeky driver hit the squeaky brakes just past the bull. I knew the elephant would take that as a provocation and sure enough he wheeled around and shook his enormous head. "He's coming!" we shouted, half in glee and half in terror. The guide smashed the accelerator and we pulled away just as the bull lowered his head and charged. And I caught this blurry photo of elephant rage as we made our narrow escape. We were never in any real danger, but we laughed and enjoyed the adrenaline rush.

Owl O'Clock

 

I used to draw pictures of owls peeking through big, round knotholes in trees when I was a kid. Every tree I drew had an owl. And the birds were always great horned owls with their tufted ears, even if I didn't know that at the time. This was just the iconic outline of an owl that I would see in cartoons.

Little did I know that I would spend my life looking at empty knothole after empty knothole in search of owls only to be perpetually disappointed. But I finally found one big, dark knothole that lived up to my childhood expectations.

Favorite landscapes

 

I don't spend a lot of time shooting landscapes. But in my travels I have seen some breathtaking beauty, like these foggy, snowy mountains stretching to the ocean in Antarctica. I'm pleased to present some of my favorite landscapes.

King penguins rest in a glacial creek in front of glacier-covered mountains on South Georgia Island.

A fiinback whale cruises through the Chiswell Islands in Alaska.

Spring.

Summer.

Fall. 

The seasons at Denali's Polychrome Pass. 

Grizzlies wander the sagebrush flats of Hellroaring Creek in Yellowstone.

A sea cave in the Chiswell Islands offers a peek at distant mountains.

Antarctica's undeveloped coastline and amazing glaciers made for easy landscape pics like this one with the Ortelius.

I wasn't prepared for all the vibrant colors I would see on South Georgia. I think this pic would make a good jigsaw puzzle!

A tabular iceberg the size of a small town rises over the Southern Ocean. 

If a landscape has wildlife in it, so much the better. Wildebeest graze on a hillside in Kenya's Maasai Mara.

The yellow fever trees of Kenya's Lake Nakuru are unmistakable. And this crash of white rhinos settling down for a nap under one made the photo.

Rip curl waves are unusual in New Jersey, so getting a pic of this one from the end of a jetty off Avalon was a treat.

Noted.

The cloud forests of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest were mysterious and foreboding on the morning I visited. 

An inviting road heads off into Red Rock Canyon outside Las Vegas.

Lucky shot. I captured a lightning bolt while photographing this rainbow over the tundra in Denali.

I made a pilgrimage to see Walden Pond in Massachusetts. I'm a fan of his credo: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Cades Cove is a dream for landscapes. I liked this moody scene with the first morning sun peeking through the mists.

Places where the ocean meets the land are always ready spots for photos. This is a deserted strand in Australia's Daintree Rainforest.

The Daintree is the world's oldest rainforest.

Waterfalls always make welcome photo subjects for landscapes. And Murchison Falls on the White Nile River in Uganda was no exception. This is where Ernest Hemingway crashed after his plane struck a telegraph wire over the river. The rescue plane that picked him up also crashed!

I'm an opportunistic wildlife photographer, so I just happened on this pretty picture at the Cape May County Park. I must have walked past this gazebo a million times while playing Frisbee golf here before noticing the photo possibilities on a perfect fall Sunday.

This is the only clear shot I ever captured of what people in Denali just call the mountain.

This was the last shot of one of my longest days of wildlife photography. I was up early to take a floatplane from Homer to Katmai National Park to photograph bears. And when I got back to my campsite on the beach in Homer that night, I was dead tired. It was 11 p.m. in the Land of the Midnight Sun when these two eagles landed just outside my tent at the water's edge. So I grudgingly got out of my warm sleeping bag and grabbed my camera from the car to snag a couple shots of this screaming eagle protesting the other's attempts to steal its fish in front of foggy, snowy mountains. I checked to see if it was in focus and then fell fast asleep! It turned out to be one of my fav pics.

Bird flu decimates seals

 

The New York Times reported that the bird flu has decimated elephant seal populations on South Georgia Island.

According to the Times, researchers estimate the island lost 50,000 female elephant seals to bird flu since 2023. While the flu is devastating to birds, it also infects many mammals.

South Georgia is a remote and wild place the size of Rhode Island that lies in the Southern Ocean between Argentina and Antarctica. It's a wildlife mecca for photographers because of the enormous colonies of king penguins, fur seals and elephants seals that live here surrounded by its amazing mountain scenery. I visited in 2022 and it did not disappoint.

When the smaller fur seals weren't fighting each other, they were trying to rip my face off. I've been around dangerous animals for much of my life, but it was completely unnerving to hold my ground against a charging fur seal. Luckily, they were all bark, but their bite is no joke!

Fur seal pups and penguins alike fear the bigger leopard seals that prowl the shallows. I was lucky enough to see this leopard seal hunt down a king penguin. It was the animal I most wanted to see on my visit.

While fur seals were a menace, elephant seals just wanted to find a playmate. Did we just become best friends?

The southern elephant seal is the largest seal in the world, stretching as much as 20 feet long and weighing four tons. But they don't have a mean bone in their body — as long as you're not another elephant seal.

Two enormous northern elephant seal bulls go head-to-head during the breeding season at Piedras Blancas in California.

A beachmaster stakes out a section of beach in California. The big bull elephant seals were far out at sea when I visited South Georgia, but this northern cousin shows how they got their name.

During breeding season, the biggest beachmasters stake out sections of surf that they defend in fights that can be intense. The biggest males had already gone back to deep water when I visited in December of 2022. But these juveniles were playful. The ice-strengthened Ortelius is moored in the background.

Juvenile seals practice the art of fighting from a young age.

We were on guard for bird flu when we visited the island and limited our exploration to prevent spreading bird guano from one group of penguins or skuas to another. We also were not permitted to sit anywhere on the island or bring tripods or bags for the same reason. We endured painstaking inspections of our clothing and boots that we spent hours as a group meticulously cleaning with brushes and even safety pins the night before to prevent the spread of invasive plant seeds that might be lurking in creases or velcro. And we washed the boots in disinfectant before heading ashore and when we returned to the ship. 

A pup takes a curious sniff of our emergency gear. The concern about bird flu was justified. Penguins live in tight colonies, so a contagious virus could have devastating consequences.

The good news is that wildlife on South Georgia is resilient and has recovered from horrifying losses in the past. During the whaling era, people nearly wiped out every seal on the island. But when whaling ended in 1965, seal populations came roaring back.

Today, South Georgia is protected for wildlife, leaving only the hulking remains of the whaling industry as a reminder of our recklessness.

So with hope elephant seals will rebound quickly on this island that has become a sanctuary for the animals and birds who live here.