Eating Gophers for Lunch

Gruesome, if you're of the gopher persuasion, lunch if you're a heron. This happens every spring, across the street from our house on the edge of the city limits. Heron can't catch fish in muddy high water so they stalk gophers. Typically they stand still as a pencil behind a gopher hole; when the gopher sticks his head up, he gets stabbed with the heron's beak, lifted up all a'wiggle, then stabbed fatally. The heron then tosses his meal up in the air and catches the gopher head first and ... swallows. One spring we saw one heron swallow two gophers in thirty minutes. Talk about overweight!

OK, it's not fine art but it is what cameras and long lenses sometimes do. 

Click on Richard Chapman, then on this photo to see  the whole sequence of eight photographs.

The Bear Went Over the Mountain - or tried to

The cute little black bear, maybe 200 pounds, tried to go uphill and over the top but there's a rule out there that says never, never try to get inside a herd of around 30 bison lest a couple of them get really ticked and decide to teach your sorry derriere about the rules of animal etiquette. The closest buff almost ran the poor bear down, and in one of Lois's shots the buff actually head-butted the bear's butt. We thought for a moment we'd see bear carnage but happily, she got away. Who knew bison could run soooooo fast?

For the whole sequence of the bison and the bear, click first on Richard Chapman and then on this image ...

Sunset from the South Rim, Grand Canyon, Arizona

One of my favorites, taken (probably) in 1999 on slide film. Fuji? Maybe. I don't think the color was enhanced in Photoshop but does it matter? It's not forensic photography. Besides, I have several other images that are just as intense, just as red.