Captured

A female black bear with a freshly caught male Kokanee salmon in Taylor Creek near Lake Tahoe. While this shot is an ok profile of the bear, I really loved how the salmon turned out. You can see what a beautiful fish they are when in the breeding form.

And a huge congrats to the Giants for their game 1 victory last night over Cliff Lee and the Rangers. I thought they would pull out a win against him, but not quite in that high-scoring fashion! Go Giants!

Cub on a log

A black bear cub finishing up the last scraps of a Kokanee salmon on a log alongside of Taylor Creek. This was one of the few frames where I was able to get some of the autumn color behind the bears as well.

Stilted reflection

I have a bunch more bear images sitting in the queue, but I thought I'd go with something of a more typical variety for my blog this Monday morning to mix things up a bit. Here's a lovely black-necked stilt walking through the shallows of Shollenberger Park in Petaluma. I just love to see these birds, and I think they are especially striking in photographs with their starkly contrasting plumage. With the very shallow water along the edges of the pond, this frame really shows off the wonderfully long legs of this species. In fact, they have the second longest legs of any species relative to their body size, with only the flamingo being longer.

Stalking salmon, Black bear cub in Taylor Creek

It was really fun to watch this playful cub bounce around the creek while his mother was focused on consuming as much salmon as possible. However, we did see the cub catch a few fish on his own which he would grab and then run to the other side of the creek to eat it away from the stream. Perhaps he's had a few get away from him before, and knows they are easier to keep track of on land. This is about as serious as we saw the cub, where you can tell he was intent on watching where the salmon were moving in the stream ahead of him. In the end though, he decided this was not the right place to catch a meal.

View more photographs of black bears.

Cub along the fence

This cute little black bear cub belongs to the mother bear from my previous posts. It was really fun to watch him bound around the creek side, and he even caught a few salmon for himself. In this shot he's taking a quick break from chasing the fish to see what was happening upstream of the salmon fence.