Tule Elk Face Off -- Plus, I Need your votes for the National Geographic Contest

So here's another image that has been sitting in my queue, ready to be posted, just waiting for the right moment. Well, today is finally the right time -- and there's a good reason why:

One of my other images from this fight has been selected as a nominee for the Viewer's Choice Award in the 2010 National Geographic Photo Contest. I could really use your help in the voting -- please follow the link below and rate my elk as a 10!

Please follow this link to the National Geographic site and rate my image a 10! The voting ends on December 15.

This is the image in the contest, which I blogged back in August:


Thanks for voting and please spread the word to anyone that might be interested! These are both shots of a fight between two male tule elk during the rutting season in Point Reyes National Seashore.

Quail in the rain

A male California quail watching over his family group near the Bear Valley Visitor's Center in Point Reyes National Seashore. This is a fun time of year to see quail (although they weren't too keen to see me), since the family groups are really quite large. I would guess there were at least 25 birds in this flock that was scouring the grounds near the visitor's center parking lot. As soon as they saw me from across the road though, they disappeared into the shrubs. It was pretty amazing how easily they faded into the landscape that was just in front of me. This lone male was watching over the proceedings from a high perch (a fence post in this case), which I have often seen them do. Perhaps it is a trait of nobility evident in our state bird.

As for the shot, the conditions were clearly not ideal for photography, with heavily overcast skies and even some drizzle. I was happy to get at least this sharp frame out of the bunch though, since I'm a big fan of birds sitting on cool old fenceposts. I also love having some of the drizzle visible in the frame, although my camera may beg to differ. It's interesting to see how far a tiny raindrop can fall in 1/125 of a second!

Semipalmated plover

Before I saw the huge flock of sandpipers flowing along the beach at Limantour Spit in Point Reyes National Seashore, I had a wonderful encounter with 15-20 semipalmated plovers on that same stretch of beach. It was a great time of day for shorebird photography -- mid-morning with a rising tide. All of the shorebirds were more interested in napping and preening than running around and feeding. They likely spent the early hours feeding on the estuarine mudflats during low tide, and then were ready to rest and digest on the beach.

Incoming

A group of shorebirds lands while a second wave approaches the runway. This is just a portion of the large flock of western sandpipers, sanderlings, and dunlin that I saw along Limantour Spit in Point Reyes National Seashore this day.

View more photographs of sandpipers.

Late light, tall grass, and a burrowing owl

These shots are from March of this year at Cesar Chavez Park in Berkeley. By this late in the spring, the grass had grown high, and the burrowing owls seemed to enjoy the extra cover. Thankfully there was a narrow tunnel through the grass that stretched from the bird to the trail, and I was able to get an unobstructed shot. I've been sitting with the images from this series in my queue for quite some time, and today finally felt like the right day to post some. I'm not sure why I passed them over for so long.





Shared as part of World Bird Wednesday -- click here to check out the other posts for this week